The intended users are those who perform investigations, or information collection (intelligence) activities, as individuals or on a team, and who work in the private, legal, security, news (journalism), or government (local, state, or federal) professions.
Cases: Skopos organizes investigations and operations into Cases. Each case is a simple container for the details and results of a case. As expected, the case keeps track of: Case Details, Assignees, Activities, Dossiers, and Events and Associations.
Activities: Facts must be supported by evidence, and is a strict requirement of any professional investigator or intelligence collector. Skopos limits evidence collection to explicit activities, so if the validity of the evidence is questioned, then Skopos can retrieve the Who's, When's, Where's, Why's, and How's of the evidence collection process.
Entities: People, Places, and Actions form the foundation of what most people seek to understand. These are ultimately associated with one another in Events, which form a timeline to tell a story that answers the case's requirements.
Analytics: Collection activities rarely gather the whole picture at once. Often, data is scattered, and information is incomplete. What multiple sources yield can seem unrelated, which can get worse as information grows. Skopos helps users visually see these events, associations, and patterns by displaying them in auto-generated matrices and charts.
Exhibits: Evidence is stored and presented in the form of exhibits. These are usually photos, videos, audio recordings, or other miscellaneous files, all of which Skopos accepts and stores in the cloud. Skopos has additional features to clandestinely capture photos or audio in the background, even if the device is asleep. The files are stored locally until the user explicitly uploads it to the cloud, along with any other files the user may choose on the device.
Cloud Storage: Cloud storage was chosen for ease of access, collaboration, and restoration. If the users device is lost, stolen, broken, etc, then the user can login with another device and continue from whence they left off. The system is end-user encrypted, so Skopos admins cannot view user, case, activity, nor storage information. It is all just gibberish in the console.
Collaboration: Skopos allows professionals to work together on a case. A principal creates a case, and has ultimate control over it. He can send cases to other collectors who participate in activities to collect information. Skopos sends collector and case information between users via URIs that are passed via text or email. A principal can even transfer ownership to another collector, thus relinquishing control to the new principal.
Files and Dossiers: Skopos can export cases in HTML. This allows cases to be given to an audience. or client in a simple, ubiquitous format. HTML was chosen, so most exhibits can be viewed or heard in a standard HTML5-compliant browser (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc). This makes presentation easy, straight forward, and supported for quite some time.