I have a question and idk if you can answer but I see you on here quite often so figured you may. When a person or an unidentified is entered into nameus or doe network does it automatically do a cross reference w/dna results or anything like that?
Well, let me give it a try, because it's not a simple answer.
Doenetwork doesn't do any direct work; they're more of a clearinghouse for missing and unidentified cases that are listed elsewhere.
There are many databases of DNA that can be used for various purposes and all DNA tests are not the same. The human genome is huge, so any application that wants to work with it generally selects a few segments of the genome that are relevant to their study. These are the loci (singular locus) and I think there may be other names depending on what kind of work is being done and how the information is extracted. So the loci that are relevant for identification are ones that are most unique to an individual. This is the opposite of what an ancestry site is looking for; their loci are the ones that are shared across large groups (I think they're phenotypes or something like that; this is not an area I'm very familiar with). A website oriented to medical issues, like 23&me, is looking for yet another set of information. But they do all overlap some.
The law enforcement databases have to adhere to forensic standards, which means among other things more restrictive quality control on the process and standards for repeating the test to make sure it's correct. This is one of the reasons why it's sometimes such a long wait for results; a commercial DNA testing company can do hundreds of tests in the time it takes a forensic lab to do one. But the commercial DNA companies have a fairly high error rate. Forensic testing accepts basically no errors at all.
There are several databases where forensic DNA results are stored. The biggest is the FBI's CODIS database; others are the FACES lab at LSU and the big lab at University of North Texas. CODIS is primarily for law enforcement purposes and didn't used to be available for non-LE matching. NAMUS is a branch of the Department of Justice that is responsible for the missing person and unidentified and unclaimed person data. Many states have their own versions of DNA databases for state purposes and there are even some county-level ones like Los Angeles county.
Currently the UNT lab is the host for the NAMUS database and the operating software. Until a couple of years ago it was FACES. It could go somewhere else in the future but as of now, that's where it's at.
NAMUS has software that compares a given sample with all the other samples it knows about, which means searching all those other databases. There used to be issues with matches being missed because it didn't know about a database or it wasn't accessible or something. They were rare, but even rare isn't acceptable. I don't know the ins and outs of how they implemented it, but the new software supposedly deals with all those issues and I have not heard of a problem yet. It's been on line for a couple of years now, I think.
I'm gonna save this now before it disappears...