i202 Fall 2009 School of Information, UC Berkeley

 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/nyregion/connecticut/09crimect.html

This article describes the emergence of a need to interconnect various criminal databases so that a judge, or any other decisionmaker involved in the judiciary process, can have a complete view of the defandant criminal history.

Sean Thakkar, who is appointed to the task of designing the Connecticut Criminal Justice Information System, says that "the concept is quite simple". It appears that the system will concist of a common repository for criminal data records from various external systems (agencies). The end-user interface is presumably a read-only one, while the synchronization process is left unknow in the article (automatic batch or trigger - loose or strong coupling? revisioning of the data? what about the various source/formats?). The general architecture of the project might well be very complex, given the need of integrating all the various data channels, wich presumably use different standards (if not legacy ones).