Abstract

We employ a knowledge graph (KG) approach to aggregate qualitative information to harness and systematically incorporate contextual information into a forensic investigation. We are interested in tracing the spatial distribution and what happens to unidentified human remains after discovery—relationships and successive movements that are not necessarily captured in formal reports. Our aim is to show that, once it is properly modeled, constructed, and implemented in a scalable graph database infrastructure, a KG can be used to answer a rich set of questions that are of direct interest to researchers, forensic practitioners, and advocates. Our focus here is the development of our KG and methodology. We analyze a dataset of South Texas newspaper articles (n = 370) to search for patterns in the trajectories of migrant case outcomes. We utilize local newspapers because they are a ubiquitous source of …

Date

2026

Authors

Molly Miranker, Min‐Hsueh Chiu, Mayank Kejriwal, Alberto Giordano

Journal

Journal of Forensic Sciences