Other Systems
There are other ballistic identification systems in the market, such as Russia's ARSENAL by Papillon Systems, POISC by SBC Co. Ltd, and EVOFINDER by SCANBII Technology. These however, were never able to penetrate the international market to any significant degree. Consequently, the installed base of these systems is small.
The lack of a significant installed base may prove to be a substantial issue in the future of these systems. Specifically, this may have an adverse impact on the capability of the developers to refine their systems' correlation algorithms and networking capabilities.
The correlation algorithm is what enables an Automated Ballistic Identification System to distinguish one bullet/cartridge case from another. Computer simulations alone cannot be relied on in developing a reliable algorithm. At some point, this algorithm must be "field-tested" against a real-life database. The bigger the database against which the developers can test, the more reliable the algorithm. To put it simply, the only way to determine if a correlation algorithm will be able to find a match a of specimen against a database of 1,000,000 entries is to do an actual test against a database of 1,000,000 entries.
Installed base is again a significant issue in matter of networking. Again, the only way to validate computer simulations is to field-test it in a real network environment. As of July 2007, the only known functioning automated ballistic identification networks run on the IBIS platform.
Read more about this topic: Automated Firearms Identification
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