IDES-Intelligent Data Extraction System-is the name of a new project, founded by Campania Regional Government (Italy) and developed by the CIRA-Italian Aerospace Research Centre that aims at implementing an advanced tool to support Government Bodies in the discovery and localization of environmental criticalities. In detail, this project will develop a software and hardware platform for image, data and document analysis in order to support law enforcement investigations. The fight against illegal waste dumping is the first objective of the IDES project and the main goal is to develop algorithms for image analysis in order to automatically identify this environmental criticality. The first task is to identify the statistical link between specific features extracted from satellite images or acquired by airborne sensors, possibly in combination with punctual information (results of chemical analysis, physical property measurements, information pertaining to the population), and environmental criticalities (e.g. illegal dumping, illegal landfills etc). IDES will offer an integrated Geographic Information System (GIS) repository of information extracted and collected by various government bodies. Furthermore, an innovative aspect of IDES is the integration between information extracted from remotely sensed images and information extracted from textual documents through a semantic analysis. The results of this last analysis will be a taxonomydriven document searching and browsing system in which all documents are categorized and all relevant entities in documents (e.g. people, organizations, places and events) are extracted and represented by means of concept maps. Finally, these results: a) provide support to government bodies "end-users"; b) can be included in a GIS; c) can constitute the basis for the application of Artificial Adaptive Systems used in the domain of semantic analysis of