Terrorist Watcher : An Interactive Web Based Visual Analytical Tool of Terrorist's Personal Characteristics

Terrorism is a phenomenon that rose to its peak nowadays. Counter terrorism analysts work with a large set of documents related to different terrorist groups and attack types to extract useful information about these groups’ motive and tactics. It is evident that terrorism became a global threat and can exist anywhere. In order to face this phenomenon, there is a need to understand the characteristics of the terrorists in order to find if there are general characteristics among all of them or not. However, as the number of the collected documents increase, deducing results and making decisions became more and more difficult to the analysts. The use of information visualization tools can help the analysts to visualize the terrorist characteristics. However, most of the current information visualization tools focus only on representing and analyzing the terrorist organizations, with little emphasis on terrorist’s personal characteristics. Therefore, the current paper presents a visualization tool that can be used to analyze the terrorist’s personal characteristics in order to understand the production life cycle of a terrorist and how to face it.