Visualizing Patterns in a Global Terrorism Incident Database

Abstract

The terrorism database includes more than 27000 terrorism incidents between 1968 and 2006. Each incident record has spatial information (country names for all records and city names for some records), a time stamp (ie year, month, and day), and several other fields (eg tactics, weapon types, target types, fatalities, and injuries). We introduce a unified visualization environment that is able to present various types of patterns and thus to facilitate explorations of the incident data from different perspectives. With the visualization environment one can visualize either spatiomultivariate, spatiotemporal, temporal - multivariate, or spatiotemporal - multivariate patterns. For example, the analyst can examine the characteristics (in terms of target types, tactics, or other multivariate vectors) of aggregated incidents and at the same time perceive how multivariate characteristics change over time and vary spatially. Special attention is devoted to the application-specific data analysis process, from data compilation, geocoding, preprocessing, and transformation, through customization and configuration of visualization components, to the interpretation and presentation of discovered patterns.