ADVISE aims to design and develop a unification framework for surveillance-footage archive systems, in an effort to deal with the increasingly critical need to provide automated and smart surveillance solutions.This need arises due to the continuous growth of surveillance systems in scale, heterogeneity and utility. There are two major obstacles: the variety on the technical components of the surveillance systems, producing video repositories with different compression formats, indexing systems, data storage formats sources, and the fact that such a system should take into careful consideration the legal, ethical and privacy rules that govern surveillance and the produced content. Towards both, ADVISE has been formed by experts on both technological and legal, ethical, privacy aspects, with valuable experiences in the Security field. To further ensure the applicability of the proposed system, ADVISE’s consortium includes some major European security agencies, while will be in collaboration with plenty other through its Advisory Boards.In terms of implementation, the ADVISE system will be split into two major components. The first will be performing the semantically enriched, event based video analysis, which will offer efficient search capabilities into video archives and sophisticated result visualisation. The second will enforce the legal, ethical and privacy constraints that apply to the exchange and processing of the surveillance data. Towards interoperability, the exchanged content and the associated metadata will be transformed into a common format. A Dedicated ADVISE Engine will be develop per peer authority in order to efficiently deal with each peer authority’s technical and Legal/Ethical/Privacy specificities. The components of ADVISE, after negotiating all relevant legal, ethical and privacy constraints, will be able to help the law enforcement authorities fight against crime and terrorism via efficient evidence mining into heterogeneous video archives