The Crimes Against Children (CAC) Ontology Family is a Project VIC International led and community-developed technology that provides a structured (ontology-based) specification for representing information commonly analyzed and exchanged by people and systems during investigations involving digital evidence related to crimes against children.

The power of the CAC Ontology is that it provides a common language to support automated normalization, combination and validation of varied information sources to facilitate analysis and exploration of investigative questions (who, when, how long, where). In addition to representing tool results, CAC Ontology ensures that analysis results can be traced back to their source(s), keeping track of when, where and who used which tools to perform investigative actions on data sources.

CAC Ontology extends the Unified Cyber Ontology (UCO) and the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE) Ontology, providing specialized modules for modeling child exploitation investigations, operations, legal processes, reporting, offender tradecraft, and digital forensics activities. Project VIC International has open sourced the CAC Ontology under Apache 2 so that other organizations can freely build upon it.

Consider making a tax-deductible donation today to help Project VIC International continue to lead and keep the develop this effort for the benefit of all. We ask companies who adopt and financially benefit from the CAC Ontology to financially support this effort with 1% of the earnings they make from monetizing the CAC Ontology.