Tracking the Threat - Terror Network Visualization

Social networks are powerful tools. Similar to graphical representations for easy comprehension of mathematical data, they allow one to quickly and visually analyze the connections between various nodes in any type of network. Just as they can be useful for mapping out business relationships, or one's "friends" list on a social networking site, they can be used to map out the connections and relationships of enemies. The enemy, in this case, is the terror network known as Al Qaeda.

TrackingTheThreat.com hails itself as "a database of open source information about the Al Qaeda terrorist network, developed as a research project of the FMS Advanced Systems Group". Present on their site is a "Network Navigator" that enables one to visually see the relationships between various terrorist leaders, terrorist attacks, global locales, and many other important points of information. Being open source, this site most certainly contains no confidential or classified government information, though, it can certainly help offer one a better understanding of the workings of this terror network.

As there is a vast amount of information contained within the database, the ability to expand, condense, and rearrange particular nodes is a very welcome addition. One can visualize individual paths between nodes, or the entire network at once, if one feels so inclined. (I pity the person's computer who attempts to do so, however.) Because of the huge amounts of information on global terror networks, I believe plotting them visually is the only practical means of doing so. Pages and pages of cross-referential text would be nigh useless. Given the information contained in this visualization, one could plot all the data geographically, which they actually did using the Google Maps API, available both on their home page, and in large format here.

As evidenced above, there's a number of ways data can be plotted. The human mind, being able to visualize concepts better than ponder them abstractly, will certainly absorb and comprehend information presented in a graphical format better than that which is not.