Abstract
Analysis of terrorist social networks is essential for discovering knowledge about the structure of terrorist organizations. Such knowledge is important for developing effective combating strategies against terrorism. Visualization of a network with the support of social network analysis techniques greatly facilitates the inspection of the network global structure. However, its usefulness becomes limited when the size and complexity of the network increase. In this work, we develop two interactive visualization techniques for complex terrorist social networks: fisheye views and fractal views. Both techniques facilitate the exploration of complex networks by allowing a user to select one or more focus points and dynamically adjusting the graphical layout and abstraction level to enhance the view of regions of interest. Combining the two techniques can effectively help an investigator to recognize patterns previously unreadable in the normal display due to the network complexity. Case studies are presented to illustrate how such visualization tools are capable to extract the hidden relationships among terrorists in the network through user interactions. Experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of the visualization techniques.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Sparrow, M.K.: The application of network analysis to criminal intelligence: an assessment of the prospects. Social Network 13 (1991)
Wasserman, S., Fause, K.: Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1994)
Xu, J., Marshall, B., Kaza, S., Chen, H.: Analyzing and Visualizing Criminal Network Dynamics: a Case Study. In: Proceedings of ISI 2004, Tucson, AZ, June 10-11 (2004)
Xu, J., Chen, H.: Criminal Network Analysis and Visualization. In: CACM, vol. 48(6) (2005)
Xu, J., Chen, H.: CrimeNet Explorer: A Fremework for Criminal Network Knowledge Discovery. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 23(2), 201–226 (2005)
Eades, P.: A Heuristic for Graph Drawing. In: Congressus Numerantium, vol. 42 (1984)
Furnas, G.W.: Generalized Fisheye Views. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System (1986)
Manojit, S., Brown, M.H.: Graphical Fisheye Views. In: CACM, vol. 37 (1994)
Koike, H.: Fractal Views: a Fractal-based Method for Controlling Information Display. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 13(3) (1995)
Feder, J.: Fractals. Plenum, New York (1988)
Sageman, M.: Understanding Terror Networks. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2004)
Leung, Y.K., Apperley, M.D.: A review and taxonomy of distortion-oriented presentation techniques. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 1(2) (1994)
Yang, C.C., Chen, H., Hong, K.: Visualization of Large Category Map for Internet Browsing. Decision Support Systems 35(1), 89–102 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Yang, C.C., Liu, N., Sageman, M. (2006). Analyzing the Terrorist Social Networks with Visualization Tools. In: Mehrotra, S., Zeng, D.D., Chen, H., Thuraisingham, B., Wang, FY. (eds) Intelligence and Security Informatics. ISI 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3975. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11760146_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11760146_29
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-34478-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-34479-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)