Factil has completed Proof of Concept for improving child safety
Factil is pleased to announce that we have successfully completed the Proof of Concept project for sharing information nationally to ensure child safety. The project was conducted under the Australian Government's Business Research Innovation Initiative (BRII).
Factil has developed Kalinda to solve this BRII challenge. Kalinda is an aboriginal word that means “to look out” or “to see”. Kalinda’s design is based on creating a hosted central system, housed in a secure data centre, that receives a “thin-layer” of data from the child protection systems of participating agencies and provides a web interface for case officers to search nationally for child protection information.
The central system consists of:
- A Database Server holding person, location and relationship information, user data, and public data, that has been indexed for fast partial-match retrieval.
- An Integration Server that receives batch and incremental data from participating agencies and loads the data into the database. The integration server also uses a machine-learning algorithm to pre-compute confidently-matched records which are also loaded into the database.
- A Web Server which handles user login, search and related functions for case officers, and a range of data administration functions for data stewards and systems administrators.
Kalinda supports two search modes:
- A general query mode that searches for records that match a name, personal characteristics and/or relationships with people or locations.
- A record matching mode that finds records from other agencies that match the given search record.
For each search, Kalinda returns a set of results, ranked in order of importance to case workers.
To implement the Kalinda search process, Factil has developed an advanced machine learning algorithm to pre-compute confidently matched records and powerful database indexing techniques to perform both exact and partial matches. We believe that both algorithms are amongst the most advanced of their kind in the world. The Kalinda search process has been specifically designed to handle a wide range of spelling variations, common name alternatives, typographical errors, and missing or inconsistent data.
