Design and development of an early warning system to prevent terrorist attacks

Abstract

EWAS is an early warning prototype that collects and analyzes news items from the European Media Monitor. Although, it currently processes news articles, it can easily be adapted to any other form of text. Data mining functions performed by the system are categorization, clustering, and named entity extraction. The main design concern of the system is scalability, which is achieved by a modular architecture that allows multiple instances of the same component to run in parallel. The main objective behind this research is to develop a system to identify “who is doing what” to estimate “who can do what” in order to predict “what can really happen tomorrow”.