Ontology in the Digital Forensics Domain: A Scoping Review

Abstract

A need for the use of automation in digital forensics is imminent. With the overwhelming workload for analysing collected digital evidence, law enforcement agencies are no longer meeting the quality investigations we expect. For automation to work (e. g., integrating heterogeneous data sources, structuring unstructured data, or drawing conclusions from structured data), formalisation must be specified. Specification of formalisation includes as a first step to describe concepts in the domain of digital forensics. In this contribution, we analyse the state of the art of ontological formalisation in the domain of digital forensics via a scoping review. There are some attempts to formalise the technical domain of digital forensics in ontologies, but they do not cover essential context, like technical annotations or acquisition modelling. Future work will be to use the existing foundations and extend them with facts and rules to enable reasoning.