Studying the presence of terrorism on the web: an knowledge portal approach

Terrorist organizations and their sympathizers are using Web sites and online bulletin boards for propaganda, recruitment and communication purposes. We call this alternate side of the Web used by terrorists, the Dark Web. Dark Web information can be analyzed to enable better understanding and analysis of the terrorism phenomena. However, several problems such as information overload and language barriers are preventing the effective collection of Dark Web contents. We propose a knowledge portal approach and built a Dark Web portal system to support the discovery and analysis of Dark Web information. Specifically, the Dark Web portal integrates terrorist-generated multilingual datasets on the Web and uses them to study advanced and new methodologies for predictive modeling, terrorist (social) network analysis, and visualization of terrorists´ activities, linkages, and relationships