Towards a Comprehensive Ontology for Electronic and Physical Evidence in Cybercrime

With the rapidly increasing data volume of electronic and physical evidence in cybercrime, the time to analyze and respond will con- tinue to increase. In this study, we propose a cybercrime ontology to effectively analyze, store, and respond to evidence of cybercrime. The power of our proposed ontology is to consider the difficulties of associating digital and physical evidence while integrating the law which determines who can access what. Such integration will enable powerful inference and reasoning of the formal ontology as it incorporates concepts from 1) digital evidence, 2) physical evidence, and 3) law (criminal, civil, and administrative).<br> We construct and represent our ontology using Web Ontology Language (OWL), the highly expressive and the most popular lan- guage for representing ontologies and their concepts. We develop a prototype system of our ontology using Protégé, a free and open- source development environment for knowledge-based systems. The logic behind this implementation is to give the machine the ability to reason and infer knowledge from the evidence and law sub-ontologies to ensure logical consistency and compute plausible relationships between the ontology’s concepts to help effectively resolve cybercrimes.<br>