Resource of the Week
By Shirl Kennedy, Deputy Editor

We gave the Terrorism Knowledge Base, sponsored by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), a brief mention here on resources last fall. This site has come a long way since then, and we’d like to introduce you to some of its features this week.

Terrorism–Databases
Source: National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism
MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base
This site bills itself as “the one-stop resource for comprehensive research and analysis on global terrorist incidents, terrorism-related court cases, and terrorist groups and leaders,” and we can’t argue that it’s extremely comprehensive. Basically, what we have here is a searchable directory that comprises six sections:
+ Groups — Profiles of terrorist organizations that you can sort alphabetically (in ascending or descending order) by name of group or base of operations.
+ Cases — Legal cases that you can sort by date or U.S. indicted.
+ Countries/Areas — Country profiles that incorporate data from the CIA World Fact Book, Transparency International, and The International Centre for Prison Studies. View alphabetically or sort regionally.
+ Incidents — Many sorting options are available for this database of terrorism incidents. View data by date, geographic location, number of fatalities, targets, tactics weapons… When I looked here Tuesday evening, there was a link for “Recently Added Incidents,” but clicking on it produced “no results.”
+ Leaders and Members — View profiles (which include pictures, where available) of terrorist group leaders and group members. Sort by name, group or role.
+ Information Resources — An organized listing of articles, books, organizations/governments, brochures, CD-ROMs, electronic resources, magazines, proceedings, reports, sound recordings and video resources. Sort by title, author or publisher.

There is a lot of data here. According to the site, you’ll find over 35 years of international terrorism data; over 5 years of worldwide domestic terrorism data, over 20 years of US terrorism cases, hundreds of group and leader profiles and a searchable image archive; and interactive GIS, side-by-side comparison, graphing, and statistical analysis tools. The analytical tools can be used to “create charts and graphs and tables that analyze RAND data on terrorist incidents or legal data on the prosecution of terrorists,” or you can look at pre-defined incident, group or legal reports. An Incident Analysis Wizard allows you to create pie graphs, line graphs or bar graphs of numbers of terrorism-related incidents, injuries or deaths, or terrorist groups — in two or three dimensions.

One intriguing new feature under development is the National Counterterrorism Center Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS). The complex query form permits lots of search choices: date (currently offers only data from the year 2004); geographic location (region, country, state/province, city); event type; perpetrator; target (facility type, characteristic, nationality, degree of damage); victim (type — political leader, educator, etc., characteristic — religion, etc., nationality). You can also search events by victim statistics — total victims, fatalities, wounded, hostages.

Yes, it’s complex. But they’ve recently added a two-minute virtual tour of the site that is quite helpful. Other resources here:
+ A link to the National Counterterrorism Center report, A Chronology of Significant International Terrorism for 2004 (PDF; 2.83 MB)
+ Recent terrorism-related news headlines from AP.
+ Links to other sites with terrorism-related news and data
+ An extensive glossary of terrorism-related terms
+ An Image Archive, where you can search for photos of terrorist groups, their leaders, and terrorism incidents. (The page warns that “certain pictures might be graphic in nature and not suitable for all ages.”)

The entire site is searchable; use the simple keyword search box on the home page or choose the advanced search form, which includes an array of dropdown menus that let you specify search parameters relating to the characteristics of terrorist groups and/or incidents, dates, geographic locations and legal cases.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2005 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.