Staying Vigilant, Confronting Terrorism: Proposal
The threat of terrorism is growing everyday and many countries, including Singapore, have taken steps to mitigate the risks of terrorism. In the National Day Rally 2016, PM Mr. Lee Hsien Loong mentioned that diplomats and security forces have been doing their job well but despite their efforts, it does not mean that terrorist attacks will not happen in Singapore. The recent attack that attempted to fire a rocket to hit Marina Bay Sands Area from Batam was successfully intervened but this signals to the country that the terrorism threat should not be taken lightly. In response to the growing terrorist threat, the SGSecure Movement was launched to prepare the public in the event of an attack. In recent years, there is a rise in research on terrorist organizations and the activities they have performed, regardless of scale, over the years. However, more still needs to be done to analyze past terrorist activities and gain insights from it easily so that all countries could better prepare for a worst case scenario.
In this project, we are interested to find out and understand the spread of terrorist activities and the behavior of terrorists’ organizations and their attack patterns (e.g. bombing, assassination, shooting) regionally/globally. This allows respective policy makers, government or intelligence agencies to better analyze terrorist organizations and their spread internationally so that they could devise appropriate policies/measures to prevent potential attacks in future.
The final visualization aims to help analysts perform the following:
- Understand the spread of terrorist attacks and its fatalities regionally/globally
- Understand the spread of terrorist organizations and their attack activities regionally/globally
The dataset for analysis will be retrieved from the Global Terrorism Database (https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/using-gtd/).
Our project will analyze on the following attributes:
- Geographical spread of terrorist attacks
- Type of terrorist attacks (e.g. bombing, assassination, bombing etc.)
- Target of terrorist attacks (e.g. police, embassy etc.)
- Perpetrators of terrorist attacks (e.g. ISIS, Al-Qaeda etc.)
- Weapons used in terrorist attacks (e.g. chemical, fireams etc.)
- Extent of damage in terrorist attacks
Many visual and data analysts have made use of data collected from the Global Terrorism Database to visualize and understand the extent of terrorist attacks around the world. Some of their works include the following:
- A visualization created to visualize geographic data (http://start.umd.edu/gtd/globe/index.html)
- An animated time-lapse visualization of terror attacks on the world map (https://www.visualnews.com/2015/12/01/15-years-world-terror-attacks-visualized-one-map/)
- An interactive visualization developed by 2 visual analysts to show trends and events that shaped the history of terrorism overtime (http://parano.github.io/Global-Terrorism-Visualization/)
- An analysis of death tolls & terrorist incidents around the world (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3322308/Number-people-killed-terrorists-worldwide-soars-80-just-year.html)
Our group has proposed the following storyboard to assist analysts in the use of our visual application:
Our group attempts to perform self-learning on the respective visualization tools and technologies that we may apply throughout the course of this project. Peer learning will take place during meetings for us to learn from each other and apply these techniques to our project. During the process of data cleaning, preparation and analysis, our group aims to conduct these activities together. After we have performed a detailed analysis, we will then derive the respective deliverable that will be included in the final visualization application. Tasks (e.g. visual design, animation, application development, etc.) will be delegated to each group member for the project completion.
The following shows our project timeline for the completion of this project:
Feel free to comment to help us improve our project! (:
