TOC-search, A joint project of the Faculty of Mathematics and the Faculty of Security, University of Belgrade

The Terrorist and Organized Criminal Search Data Base (TOC-s) is a dynamic data base which offers comprehensive information on global terrorist network. It is designed to become both educational and practical tool which helps researchers, analysts, students and others working to prevent terrorism. The TOC-s is a joint project of Faculty of Security Studies and Faculty of Mathematics, University of Belgrade, with the support of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

The scope of the TOC-search data base is to provide in-depth research and analysis on terrorist incidents, terrorist groups, organizations, their members, leaders and also links and relations between the individuals and groups. The idea is to integrate data from variety of sources, including foreign and domestic news, professional security journals, reports and databases, academic works. Several analytical features are to be incorporated in the database. Analytical tools will provide statistical information analysis of the global terrorist network. The researcher will be able to analyze terrorism trends over time and to compare different aspects of terrorism between countries, regions and terrorist groups (type of terrorist attacks, level of organization, tactics, communi-cation level, size of a terrorist group, age or race of its members,...).

An analytical-purpose system will be used to understand the structure of different terrorist organizations with respect to particular attack types or regions of their activity. By using this system, the intelligence analysts will be able to develop hypotheses and then validate them (or not) against the data in the TOC-s information space. In this way, it will be possible to provide certain predictions of international terrorism trends, seasonality, and periodicity of terrorist events.

Regarding the practical aspects of the TOC-s database, we emphasize the fact that the TOC-s data were primarily collected by academic groups. This means that TOC-s team was under no political or government pressure in terms of how to collect the data or how to classify them. Although the TOC-s is still in its construction phase, it has already been used in the purpose of Security of the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008, and it is currently being used in the purpose of Security of the World Championship in Football 2010.

For more information visit: http://www.tocsearch.com