About WINPHO

WINPHO is a project of the Western Identification Network, Inc. (WIN), a not-for-profit cooperative of nine states and six federal agencies. All law enforcement agencies within a WIN-member state enjoy the benefits of WIN membership and are eligible to participate in this project.

WINPHO is designed as a distributed database through which digitized mugshot capture systems are networked and information from those systems shared. The character of WINPHO is such that some agencies store mugshot information locally and provide WINPHO with access to the information on that agency's network, while other agencies store their data on a WINPHO server in Sacramento. WINPHO is NIST-compliant, meaning that properly packaged NIST transactions are handled seamlessly. However, WINPHO stores all data in simple, universally-readable formats. On the WINPHO servers, all images are stored as JPEG and all textual information is stored as plain text. The reason for this is simple: WIN understands that the mugshot images and text captured by an agency are, and forever remain, the property of that agency. Should an agency want to migrate to a different commercial mugshot system, or simply want to stop participating in WINPHO, that agency is always free to take its data and do so. Because the data are stored as JPEG and text, there is never a case in which the mugshot data are held "hostage" by WIN. This is to say that WIN will not encrypt or disassociate the user's data and then charge the user to have those data rendered readable by other systems.

An additional benefit of WIN's architecture is the ability to use Internet Explorer (I.E.) to retrieve and view WINPHO images. Because WINPHO stores images in a format readable by I.E., no additional viewing software is required. Although many commercial systems store images in a proprietary (and not readable using I.E.) format, a WINPHO interface can make it possible to use I.E. to view even these images. WIN has worked with a number of vendors to build such interfaces and continues to work on this problem today.

WINPHO is indebted to WIN members for their support, as well as U.S. Department of Commerce, Technology Opportunities Program, which awarded WIN the grant that made WINPHO possible.

For more information about WINPHO, browse the rest of this site or contact WINPHO Manager Dave Diamon at dave@winid.org. Full contact information for Dave can be found at left.