Terrorism in Time and Space: The Inclusion of Spatio-Temporal Data from Federal Terrorism Cases into the ATS Database

The goal of the project is to complete temporal and spatial data collection on all terrorism cases officially investigated by the FBI under the AG Guidelines for Terrorism Investigations for the period 1980-2004.

Information on approximately 265 variables will be extracted from the population of federal terrorism cases from 1980-2004. The data will be extracted from open source documents and court case files using automated web extraction tools developed by the Institute for the Study of Violent Groups at Sam Houston State University. The extracted variables are coded into a server-based Oracle relational database and geographic information system (GIS) developed by the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas.

The additional data will ensure a much more comprehensive and complete record of American terrorism; thereby, allowing examination of group type analyses previously not possible due to small sample sizes in earlier studies.

ca/ncf