Thanks to a unique partnership in this digital age, however, both cities have become safer places to live in. The goal was to devise software that any authorized person, at a desk or in a patrol car, could use with minimal training. Using police personnel to field test the application at each step, Chen's team built a system that is powerful, comprehensive, and easy to use. Once a prototype was in place, Tucson police linked up with their counterparts in Phoenix. It consolidates the data in an online warehouse residing within the secure intranet of a law enforcement agency.
Information is shared according to agency policy and discretion.
Officers using a PC or laptop can perform highly targeted searches of the collected data, producing investigative leads in a fraction of the time it would take by other means. It also produces successful data searches in cases where only partial information, such as part of a license plate number, is available. UDN intended its archive as a gift to the people of Taiwan. The UDN archive project is extraordinarily ambitious. More commonly, publications begin their digital archives in the year they shifted to computer-based editorial operations, often sometime in the 1980s.