Solutions: custom applications
Vertical: government

The Bureau of Justice Statistics needed a database application to combine crime and homicide statistics from various organizations and present that information in a usable, accessible online search application for use by researchers and the public.

Using the Department of Justice in-house design, Fig Leaf Software created an Oracle database accessible through a Web search application. The sophisticated database pulls together various data types from sources including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and state and local law enforcement agencies. The ColdFusion based Web application allows users to search local and state level crime and homicide data and law enforcement statistics. Through the simple interface, users can slice and compare information in a variety of ways

• One variable/multiple years
• Multiple variables/multiple years
• One year of data for a single variable.

While viewing the results of a search, users can quickly download the results as a CSV file for import into spreadsheet or statistical packages. The site is compliant with section 508 accessibility guidelines.

In addition to the public Web interface, Fig Leaf created an administrative system to permit Department of Justice data administrators to update data through a secure online wizard based interface to do real-time data updates.

The public can now identify crime trends within every neighborhood across the United States for the past forty years.  Average response times for searching the database, containing over 2 million rows of information, is less than 100 miliseconds.