Solutions : Case Study : PINS

Smarter Solutions

Summary
  • Client - Scottish Police College
  • Technology - ASP, HTML, CD-ROM
  • Budget - Confidential
Overview

The Police On-line Information System (PINS) is a training and reference library containing the two main Scottish Police procedures manuals: Road Traffic Law and Scottish Criminal Law. The system

  • Delivers information electronically view a web browser
  • Provides document management
  • Provides offline (CD-ROM) and online (intranet) browsing
Police On-line Information System

In late 1997, the Scottish Police College took over responsibility for the maintenance of the two main reference manuals used by police forces around Scotland. These manuals are used by police officers to answer queries (from the public and from other officers) on finer points or obscure areas of the law. The manuals each comprise over 3,000 loose-leaf pages of closely-set text, of which 1,000 pages are modified each year due to changes in the law, etc.

PINS Books

The original manuals were loosely structured around the various pieces of legislation, as updated and amended by various acts of parliament. Since there was no index, an officer would have to leaf through every piece of legislation which might be relevant to a given query.


The SPC recognised that converting the manuals into electronic form would not only make maintenance and distribution of the manuals far more efficient, but would also make it possible to automatically search the manuals for information on a given topic. They invited tenders for a system that would allow them to convert the existing manuals into an easily-navigable and searchable electronic form, and which would also allow them to manage updates to the material.

Partnership

The software house Edina Software was interested in bidding for the document-management side of the project, and decided to call on Electrum's skills and expertise to handle the document conversion, the design and creation of the web pages, and the creation of the navigation and searching components. Together, Electrum and Edina submitted a joint bid which was accepted in the face of competition from half a dozen other companies, including Microsoft.

Pins Screenshot

Electrum's first task was to convert the 6,000 pages into a well-structured and easily navigable set of web pages. This was achieved by creating an automatic process which could recognise chapter and section headings in the text by looking for centered paragraphs, capitalisation, etc.

Once the chapter/section/sub-section hierarchy had been inferred , another custom-built tool was used to divide the text into manageable chunks and to create a web page for each chunk. This process also organised the web pages to reflect the hierarchical structure of the document, and automatically inserted navigational links.


Once this stage was complete, Electrum created an advanced navigation mechanism for the web pages using a customised version of its PowerMapper product. This represents the structure of the documentation as an expandable hierarchy of sections and sub-sections.

Finally, Electrum implemented the searching facility, which provides full-text searching of the entire system (or selected parts thereof), complete with an advanced hit-highlighting scheme.

Outcome

The system has been extremely well received, both by the Police College itself, and by the regional police forces where it has been installed. The College benefits from greatly reduced maintenance and distribution costs, while the police forces save both time and effort due to the system's power and ease of use.

PINS was officially launched by Her Majesty The Queen during her visit to the Scottish Police College on 30 June 1998.

The overwhelming success of this project has led to several further projects for the Police:

  • Electrum have developed a system which allows the PINS system to be distributed on a CD-ROM, so that it can be used by those Police stations which are not yet connected to the Internet. This system uses exactly the same content as the web-based version in conjunction with a special web server, developed in-house by Electrum, which can run directly from a CD without needing to be installed. As soon as the user inserts the CD into the drive, the PINS system starts and is ready for use, with no set-up required.
  • Electrum also developed a compact search engine for use with the CD version of PINS. This allows full-text and keyword searching of the material, and provides the same advanced features (such as boolean search expressions and hit-highlighting) as the original version.
  • The automatic document conversion tool has been extended and adapted so that it can be used to convert a much wider variety of documents, with even better results. The tool, provisionally named WWWord, has been licensed for use throughout the entire Police Service in Scotland.

All of these technologies are now available for licensing. For information about our licensing terms, contact licensing@electrum.co.uk