The Global Terrorism Trends and Analysis Center (GTTAC) documents the thousands of international and domestic terrorist attacks that occur each year. With details on various dimensions of each attack, the GTTAC familiarizes analysts, policymakers, scholars, and journalists with patterns of terrorism. The GTTAC defines terrorist attacks as: The threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation. Data collection is ongoing and updates are published annually in accordance with the Department of State’s annual report to Congress on terrorism federally, also known as the Annex of Statistical Information: Country Reports on Terrorism.
Data Sources, References & Notes: DSG created the GTTAC database that the Annex uses to summarize global terrorism incidents. GTTAC accesses five of the most comprehensive, open-source, multimedia data aggregators to identify reports of potential terrorist incidents. Data acquisition begins with using open-source technology tools developed in Python atop a Linux platform for text analysis, predictive modeling, and feature extraction. GTTAC applies ontologies for terrorist incidents, perpetrators, tactics for attack, weapon use, and the targeting of victims and facilities. Once the automated processes have established a body of data for human review and validation, the database of global terrorism incidents begins to take form within regional and other geographic locales.