Universidade Federal do Ceará
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Teleinformática

Defesa de Dissertação de Mestrado – Marcos José Alves de Barros Monteiro

Título: A Multi-Agent Traceable Semantic Graph Architecture for Digital Forensic Knowledge Representation and Relational Inference

Data: 20/06/2026
Horário: 05:00
Local: LESC

Banca Examinadora:
Victor Hugo Costa de Albuquerque (UFC, Presidente – Orientador)
Khan Muhammad (CGE)
Senthil Kumar Jagatheesaperumal (CEFET/PI)

Resumo:

Digital forensic investigations increasingly depend on the interpretation of heterogeneous evidence recovered from multiple computational artifacts. Although extraction tools have advanced considerably, connecting recovered traces to investigative reasoning remains a technical challenge, particularly when provenance and traceability must be preserved for later examination.

This dissertation introduces a graph-centered multi-agent framework for organizing digital forensic evidence as a structured semantic representation linked to artifacts extracted from forensic disk images. The framework connects entities, semantic relations, provenance metadata, and investigative hypotheses within a unified Digital Forensic Knowledge Graph, enabling relational inference under incomplete-evidence conditions.

Experimental evaluation showed 73.3% concept recovery, 73.3% semantic relation recovery, 57.0% hypothesis coverage, and full traceability coverage for evidentiary relations. Among the evaluated inference models, node2vec_bfs_ppmi_negative_l2 achieved the strongest overall performance under controlled perturbation settings.

The findings show that graph-based semantic representation can support forensic reasoning while maintaining explicit linkage between inferred relations and traceable digital evidence.

Palavras-chave: Multi-agent systems; Digital forensics; Semantic graphs; Knowledge graphs; Graph representation learning; Explainable artificial intelligence; Evidence traceability; Relational inference.