Myosotis: An Information System Applied to Missing People Problem

Abstract

According to estimates from the Federal Government, 200,000 people disappear from their homes every year in Brazil. In 2002, Brazilian national network for identification and location of missing children and adolescents established four important goals to tackle this serious problem. Our work is motivated by two of them: to create an unified register of missing people data and reported cases, and to promote information sharing among network members. Aiming at these goals, we developed Myosotis, an information system that performs analysis inside an unified database about Brazilian missing people. Data is collected autonomously from different sources. Our first empirical results show that our system outperforms all existent solutions in the country, including the official database from Brazilian government, by up to 122% when considering the number of distinct registers. Also, our pattern analysis module is capable of giving insights about what people's characteristics make them more statistically susceptible to disappear. All this consolidated information and the aggregated database as well are publicly available through a friendly open-source web application and a public API. We show how we developed this system, first in the country and still rare in the world, and the main challenges that this system still needs to overcome.