A Global Measure for Estimating the Degree of Organization and Effectiveness of Individual Actors with Application to Te
The motivation for the study described in this paper is realizing the fact that organizational structure of a group and critical members of the group are key indicators in determining its strengths and weaknesses. For instance, a general knowledge of the
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Abstract The motivation for the study described in this paper is realizing the fact that organizational structure of a group and critical members of the group are key indicators in determining its strengths and weaknesses. For instance, a general knowledge of the prevalent models of terrorist organizations leads to a better understanding of their capabilities. Though the framework is general, this chapter focuses more on terrorist networks; it is divided in two parts. The first part describes a novel approach for extracting structural patterns of terrorist networks with the help of social network analysis (SNA) measurements and techniques. A global organization measure (Org) is proposed in order to estimate the degree of organization of a social network. The second part contains a new approach which helps to find the group of the most influential people within the terrorist networks. To achieve this target, we utilize SNA measurements and techniques. The importance of such research comes from the fact that individuals in organized intellectual networks and especially terrorist networks tend to hide their individual roles and also, a general knowledge of the prevalent models of terrorist organizations leads to a better understanding of their capabilities. As a result, we argue the need to consider such networks as a whole and at the individuals’ level for discovering the degree of organization with its strengths and weaknesses. The reported test results demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the analysis as depicted in the proposed framework.
S. Aghakhani K. Dawoud J. Rokne Computer Science Department, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada R. Alhajj () Computer Science Department, University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada and Department of Computer Science, Global University, Beirut, Lebanon and Department of Information Technology, Hellenic American University, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected] U.K. Wiil (ed.), Counterterrorism and Open Source Intelligence, Lecture Notes in Social Networks 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-7091-0388-3 11, © Springer-Verlag/Wien 2011
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1 Introduction Networks can be used for representing various systems in diverse fields wherever it is possible to realize entities which could be connected by certain type of relationship. Networks consist of sets of nodes (interchangeably called vertices) linked together in pairs by edges (interchangeably called links) with nontrivial topological structures [30]. A network may be visualized as a graph and may be represented for processing using a matrix or list structure; the adjacency matrix is the most commonly used representation. Various techniques in graph theory and linear algebra are valuable for network analysis and manipulation. However, a network should be treated within a context in order to be analyzed for knowledge discovery within the specified context. In this respect, social network is one of the most popular network structures attracting considerable attention in the research community. It s
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