I stumbled across www.tkb.com and spent hours playing on the site and using as much of the functionality as possible.

“A Comprehensive Databank of Global Terrorist Incidents and Organizations”

“The MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base (TKB) is the one-stop resource for comprehensive research and analysis on global terrorist incidents, terrorism-related court cases, and terrorist groups and leaders. TKB covers the history, affiliations, locations, and tactics of terrorist groups operating across the world, with over 35 years of terrorism incident data and hundreds of group and leader profiles and trials. TKB also features interactive maps, statistical summaries, and analytical tools that can create custom graphs and tables.”

This ‘one-stop resource’ is a fantastic example of providing a simple way for the general user to personally analyze a pretty complex set of data.

Technically speaking, the Terrorism Knowledge Base integrates three disparate datasets into a single relational database.

• Database 1 –> Profiles (written by “terrorism experts”), Site Maintenance, IT environment
• Database 2 –> terrorism incident database (35+ years of data)
• Database 3 –> Indictment Dataset (terrorist related legal documents)

They use this large database as the source to run all sorts of statistical analysis, allow on-demand reporting, and provide world-maps with possible overlay data such as:

• Map backgrounds (population density, land use)
• Plot locations (major roads, nuclear factories, etc.)

The great part about the whole site is the allowance of so much user-generated content.

What I thought was fascinating was drilling down into the terrorism incident data by sub-categories…i chose to learn about terrorist groups based on their tactic. From there I found ways to waste plenty of time learning about terrorist activities.

There’s no denying that www.tkb.com allows people to make better decisions. Imagine if you were allowed to access the secret stuff!

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