Knowledge representation and reasoning meets digital forensics: The COST action DigForASP

Digital Forensics is a branch of criminalistics which deals with the identification, acquisition, preservation, analysis and presentation of the information content of digital devices. In this paper, we briefly describe DigForASP, a COST Action that aims to create a cooperation network for exploring the potential of the application of techniques from the field of Artificial Intelligence, in particular from the area of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, in the Digital Forensics field, and to foster synergies between these fields. More precisely, in DigForASP the challenge is to address the so-called Evidence Analysis phase, where evidence about possible crimes and crimes’ perpetrators must be exploited so as to reconstruct possible events, event sequences and scenarios related to a crime. Results from this phase are then made available to the involved stakeholders (law enforcement, investigators, public prosecutors, lawyers and judges). Reliability, explainability and verifiability of the results are therefore crucial.