Supporting Complex Inquiries

Most of the detectives' and magistrates' task can be regarded as “knowledge processing.” They have, typically, to acquire knowledge chunks (the clues), make hypotheses, find the contradictions inside and across the various depositions, link the consistent hypotheses in a causally connected lattice (the proof), judge the credibility of the testimonies and the reliability of the various witnesses. Sometimes the complexity of the case could justify the assistance of an intelligent decision support software. We present the general structure of an Inquiry Support System whose aim is to help a detective or a judge in: (1) generating hypotheses (automatically in some stereotypical cases), (2) eliciting a maximally consistent set of beliefs as the most believable piece of knowledge to reason with. This is done by: (1) finding the incoherences inside and across the various depositions, (2) generating the alternate maximally consistent sets of beliefs, (3) estimating the credibilities of the various evidences, and (4) estimating the reliabilities of the various informants. the solution of the case is intended to be searched among the various possible plots compatible with the maximally consistent set of beliefs retained by the system as the most believable one.