Case Study: Project Odyssey achieves secure, pan‑European gun‑crime data sharing and faster investigations with SAS

Odyssey - Customer Case Study

SAS supported Project Odyssey, an EU Framework 7 research initiative coordinated by Sheffield Hallam University to build a secure, pan‑European ballistics and gun‑crime information network. The challenge was to create a central database and secure upload/download processes that let individual officers, forensic scientists and partner agencies enter data, run cross‑border queries and keep sensitive information invisible to unauthorized users while enabling discovery of links between incidents across multiple national systems.

SAS software formed the project back‑end, managing data integration, enforcing the Odyssey Semantic Language for secure queries, and running intelligent data‑mining to surface matches, patterns and hidden structures across large ballistics and crime datasets. The result was faster, automated cross‑border alerts and pattern analysis that helped investigators identify linked incidents, trace weapon and ammunition sources, and support more informed, coordinated law‑enforcement responses across Europe.

Odyssey

Simeon Yates

Director of the Culture, Communication and Computing Research Institute