Earlier this week, Timothy Kephart, founder of Omaha-based Graffiti Tracker, spoke at this year's Gov 2.0 Expo co-produced by O'Reilly Conferences and UBM TechWeb.

Timothy's talk, Graffiti Tracker: Utilizing Data to Fight Crime, gives an excellent overview of the problem and opportunity his company addresses.

Here's more on Graffiti Tracker from the Expo's schedule:

Graffiti Tracker contracts with cities to provide graffiti tracking and analysis services via a web-based system. Graffiti Tracker has analyzed more than 1.5 million graffiti images from across the county, and gathered a substantial amount of graffiti intelligence in the process. The images are categorized in one of five ways in order to make it easier for police to identify and catch vandals:

• Role Call – Identifies members of a gang or tagging crew by their moniker (tagging name)
• Threatening – Allows law enforcement to see which gangs/crews are at odds and helps to predict future violence
• Sympathy – Alerts law enforcement when a member of a gang/crew is killed
• Territorial – Shows where gangs/crews have aggressively marked their territory
• Publicity – Announces the presence of a gang/crew

Also notable for Graffiti Tracker was the launch of their redesigned website last week (props to the DownsDesign team):

If you'd like to learn more about Timothy and his business, check out my interview with him last October: SPN interviews Timothy Kephart of Graffiti Tracker.