Analyzing the Terrorist Social Networks with Visualization Tools

Analysis of terrorist social networks is essential for discovering knowledge about the structure of terrorist organizations. Such knowledge is important for developing effective combating strategies against terrorism. Visualization of a network with the support of social network analysis techniques greatly facilitates the inspection of the network global structure. However, its usefulness becomes limited when the size and complexity of the network increase. In this work, we develop two interactive visualization techniques for complex terrorist social networks: fisheye views and fractal views. Both techniques facilitate the exploration of complex networks by allowing a user to select one or more focus points and dynamically adjusting the graphical layout and abstraction level to enhance the view of regions of interest. Combining the two techniques can effectively help an investigator to recognize patterns previously unreadable in the normal display due to the network complexity. Case studies are presented to illustrate how such visualization tools are capable to extract the hidden relationships among terrorists in the network through user interactions. Experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of the visualization techniques.