The Use of Ontologies in Forensic Analysis of Smartphone Content

Digital forensics investigators face a constant challenge in keeping track with evolving technologies such as smartphones. Analyzing the contents of these devices to infer useful information is becoming more time consuming as the volume and complexity of data are increasing. Typically, such analysis is undertaken by human, which makes it dependent on the experience of the investigator. To overcome such impediments, an automated technique can be utilized in order to aid the investigator to quickly and efficiently analyze the data. In this paper, we propose F-DOS; a set of ontologies that models the smartphone content for the purpose of forensic analysis. F-DOS can form a knowledge management component in a forensic analysis system. Its
importance lies in its ability to encode the semantics of the smartphone content using concepts and their relationships that are modeled by F-DOS.