Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2008, $165,509)
This project is for the development of a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs). It will serve two purposes to reduce DNA backlog. First it will help reduce backlog by allowing many of the missing person reports or unidentified persons to be placed into the system with geographic location information associated with each person. Second, as a result of the first item, it will reduce backlog by allowing families, law enforcement agencies, medical examiners and coroners, victim advocates, and the general public to conduct spatial searchers for locating potential hits to identify cases that otherwise may go unresolved for long periods of time. There are over 13,500 documented unidentified decedents (UID)s that exist in this country that all could benefit from DNA analysis. The geographic information will help relate the UIDs to Missing Persons through spatial relationships and help identify the families of the missing people that should be contacted to submit DNA samples for comparison to the UIDs. To solve UID cases, you have to compare DNA profiles from the UIDs with missing person DNA samples or Missing Person family reference DNA samples. People who go missing, or are otherwise found dead with no identification, are often in proximity to locations that are meaningful to them or were found near where they worked, lived or otherwise spent time. Spatial searches of this nature have demonstrated an increased ability to locate things far faster because of proximity to familiar features that are associated with them in space. Traditional database searches do not allow for searches based on proximity or geographic location.
ca/ncf