The heart of the toolkit is a knowledge base that
contains data related to terrorism, which has been
gathered and processed by dedicated tools. The
content of the knowledge base is used by the various
tools for further analysis and visualization.
The toolbox contains the following semiautomatic
tools:
• Web harvesting tools make use of data
acquisition agents (spiders) to harvest data
from the Web. The spiders are controlled by
the data conversion tools.
• Data conversion tools are responsible for
both collecting (through spiders) and
transforming data.
• Data mining tools provide selected data
mining algorithms to discover new
knowledge in data based on defined patterns.
• Social network analysis tools perform
analysis to uncover new patterns and to gain
deeper knowledge about the structure of
terrorist networks.
• Visualization tools use graph layout
algorithms to visualize discovered
knowledge regarding terrorist networks. It
can also be used as a graphics engine to
support some of the tasks performed by the
other tools in the toolbox.
The toolbox also contains the following manual
tools:
• Knowledge base tools help maintain the
knowledge base by allowing intelligence
analysts to explore and revise the knowledge
base content as well as to work with meta
data.
• Structure analysis tools focuses on
supporting the manual work with emergent
and evolving structure of terrorist networks
to uncover new relationships between
people, places, events, etc.