Knowledge Discovery and Information Visualization for Terrorist Social Networks

Abstract

Terrorist social networks present information about the relationships between terrorists which is important for investigators in combating the war of terrorism. A good analysis of terrorist social networks is essential for discovering knowledge about the structure of terrorist organizations. Typical social network analysis techniques discover patterns of interactions between social actors, for examples, detecting subgroup and identifying central individuals. Such knowledge is important for developing effective combating strategies against terrorism. A typical terrorist social network has several hundreds to thousands of nodes. Given the large number of nodes and links, it is difficult to integrate the extracted pattern with the global structure of the terrorist social network to further analyze the related actors. With the support of interactive visualization tools, investigators can further explore the network by selecting the focus of interests and extract the useful information and patterns. In this chapter, we present a social network analysis and interactive visualization technique for complex terrorist social networks. Case studies are presented to illustrate how such techniques are capable to extract the hidden relationships among terrorists in the network through user interactions.