Jose A. Rodriguez of the University of Barcelona created a network of
the individuals involved in the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid on
March 11, 2004. Rodriguez used press accounts in the two major Spanish
daily newspapers (El Pais and El Mundo) to reconstruct the terrorist
network. The names included were of those people suspected of having
participated and their relatives. Rodriguez specified 4 kinds of ties
linking the individuals involved:
- Trust-friendship (contact, kinship, links in the telephone
center).
- Ties to Al Qaeda and to Osama Bin Laden.
- Co-participation in training camps or wars.
- Co-participation in previous terrorist attacks (Sept 11,
Casablanca).
These four were added together providing a strength of connection
index that ranges from 1 to 4.
Dataset
- A CSV with names of terrorists
- A CSV with connections and strength of
connection among terrorists
Data challenges
- Use similarity among pairs of terrorists to detect the most similar
and most dissimilar individuals
- Use clustering and dissimilarity as distance to discover the
terrorist cells and highlight the cells in the terrorist network using
different colors