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With the completion of the pilot phase of the project, the Supreme Court of Ohio has begun the roll-out of a statewide justice information exchange system.
The Ohio Courts Network (OCN) will serve as a centralized warehouse of case-related data, enabling courts and justice system partners to share critical information and to support functions such as criminal history reviews, warrant and protection order searches, pre-sentencing investigations, background checks, handgun pre-purchase reviews and pre-custody reviews. OCN will enable the sharing of case-related information for open and historical cases in all jurisdictions.
Supreme Court information technology staff, Unisys Corp. and Metatomix Inc. have designed and built a system that will download, integrate and securely store information from courts and create an interface to other state agencies, including the Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. The end result will be the ability for an authorized user to search multiple justice-related information databases through a single computer application.
OCN is a closed, private, secure application and is not a public Web site. OCN is not a case management system or a repository of case documents.
The roll-out is occurring on two simultaneous fronts: connecting courts to the OCN data warehouse and training the users on the application. The number of cases available through OCN will continue to increase as more and more courts are connected to the OCN data warehouse. Training began in July and is continuing this month. The OCN team initially plans to train at least two to three users from each court across the state. It is anticipated that the OCN system will have between 3,000 and 4,000 users once it is fully implemented.
“Through OCN, the flow of information between and among Ohio courts and justice system partners will be improved because of the availability of current, accurate and centralized data,” said Chief Justice Thomas J. Moyer. “Judges will know more about the person charged with a crime who’s standing before them, and state agencies will be able to access case disposition data as soon as the court has entered it into the local system.”
“While the effort to connect all of the courts to OCN will take months of work, court personnel can still realize significant and immediate value today by using OCN’s capabilities to search various justice partner databases, which has never been available before,” said Robert Stuart, the Supreme Court’s director of information technology. “Our goal is to get the application into the hands of the people who need it most, while we simultaneously work to connect the courts of the state. We have trained more than 300 people to date and expect another 200 to complete training by the end of the month.”
To learn more about the OCN, visit: http://www.ohiocourts.gov/OCN/documents/OCN%20POC%20Internet%20Basic%20Overview.pdf.
For those who still need to register for training, visit: http://www.ohiocourts.gov/ocn/forms/OCN_Training_Registration_Form.xls.
Contact: Chris Davey or Bret Crow, 614.387.9253