INTRODUCTION Much of the detectives' and magistrates' task can be regarded as "knowledge processing." They have, typically, to acquire knowledge chunks, find the contradictions inside and across the various depositions, link the consistent hypotheses in a causally connected lattice and judge the credibility of the information and the reliability of the witnesses. * Sometimes, the complexity of the case could justify the assistance of an appropriate Decision Support System (DSS); we call Inquiry Support System (ISS) this specialized DSS. A first task of an intelligent ISS could be that of generating stereotypical hypotheses about the case under consideration. However, the ultimate task of an ISS should be that of providing a most credible and coherent set of beliefs about the case. Part of these beliefs comes from investigations on the spot and verified facts, part from the depositions of the various witnesses, part from hypotheses introduced by the detective him

The field of children's testimony is in turmoil, but a resolution to seemingly intractable debates now appears attainable. In this review, we place the current disagreement in historical context and describe psychological and legal views of child witnesses held by scholars since the turn of the 20th century. Although there has been consistent interest in children's suggestibility over the past century, the past 15 years have been the most active in terms of the number of published studies and novel theorizing about the causal mechanisms that underpin the observed findings. A synthesis of this research posits three "families " of factors—cognitive, social, and biological—that must be considered if one is to understand seemingly contradictory interpretations of the findings. We conclude that there are reliable age differences in suggestibility but that even very young children are capable of recalling much that is forensically relevant. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of expert witnesses. Since the turn of the century, psycholegal scholars have examined the suggestibility of children's testimony in an effort to determine whether they would be credible witnesses. A major issue in this research concerns the degree to which heightened

this paper which is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the model for belief revision in a multi-source environment that is the core of both, the old and the new ISS. Section 3 presents the BeliefFunction Formalism and the Bayesian Conditioning as applied in this multi-sources environment. Section 4 illustrates the new ISS discussing the relevance of these ideas in the inquiry domain. Section 5 contains an example and section 6 discusses merits and limits of ISS. 2 A Model for Belief Revision in a Multi-Source Environment

We present the architecture of an Inquiry Support System whose aim is to help a detective or a judge in: 1. generating hypotheses (automatically in some stereotypical cases), 2. eliciting a maximally consistent set of beliefs as the most believable piece of knowledge to reason with; this is done by: 2.1. finding the incoherences inside and across the various depositions, 2.2. generating the alternate maximally consistent sets of beliefs, 2.3. estimating the credibilities of the various evidences, 2.4. estimating the reliabilities of the various informants. The solution of the case is intended to be searched among the various possible plots compatible with the maximally consistent set of beliefs retained by the system as the most believable one. 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Belief Revision Much of the detectives' and magistrates' task can be regarded as "knowledge processing." They have, typically, to acquire knowledge chunks, find the contradictions inside and across the various depositions, l...

The author(s) shown below used Federal funds provided by the U.S. Department of Justice and prepared the following final report: