A Simple Ontology for the Analysis of Terrorist Attacks

The need for shared understanding in the analysis of terrorist activity has been a clearly defined national priority for over a decade. We present a foundation for an ontology to represent adversary groups and their intentions, classification of their weapons and attack types, and the ability to represent the relationship between the outcomes of an attack and the various recognized intentions of the adversary group. This Adversary-Intent-Target (AIT) model focuses on structuring knowledge to allow reasoning about which groups would be likely to choose what kinds of weapons to perform which kinds of attack. The AIT model is a generalizable and extensible system for organizing the relevant information, serving as an preliminary ontology within a larger computational system.