Being increasingly exposed to news of terror attacks, people are more concerned about their safety and whether they could get efficient response from security authorities when terror attacks actually happen. Inspired by such phenomena, our team decided to make a project about terror attacks in the past few decades using data that contains detailed information summary of each incident. Filtering down from different datasets, we chose to use the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) as our data resource, which includes information to over 170,350 domestic and international terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2016.
The original database contains over twenty categories. In this project we manipulate this dataset by only selecting some of the categories such as: the time, location, attack types, target types, motivations and weapon types mainly for data analysis. By doing so, it helps us narrow down the most useful and straightforward information that is specifically fit for the purpose of this project.
The main audiences of our project are security authorities. In particular, we want this project to be useful for people who work in security departments. We visualize GTD, with the analysis and summaries in this project, hopefully people can have a better idea in predicting terrorism incidents and have stronger security checks over areas, so that these cases can be prevented as much as possible. For example, based on density of geographic distribution of pinpoints, authorities could identify which places need to reinforce their security protection.
We use shiny app as our platform. We use a map, a table and a plot to visualize data. Users can dig out the information by choosing countries and years in the selecting box on the left side of the page. A map and a plot will be updated on the right side. Users can change countries and years to view geographic distribution of terror attacks to a country of a selected year. Locations of all terror attacks will be shown as pinpoints on the map. By zooming in and out, users can get exact locations of each terror attack on the map. By clicking on a selected pin, users can get detailed information of each terror attack, like weapon, motivation, target of each attacks.