Information Systems Frontiers - Special Issue on Terrorism Informatics

Information Systems Frontiers
Special Issue on Terrorism Informatics

Since September 11th, the multidisciplinary field of terrorism informatics has experienced tremendous growth, and research communities as well as local, state, and national governments are facing increasingly more complex and challenging issues. The challenges facing the intelligence and national security communities worldwide include accurately and efficiently monitoring, analyzing, predicting and preventing terrorist activities. The development and use of advanced information technologies, including methodologies, models and algorithms, infrastructure, systems, and tools for national/international and homeland security related applications have provided promising new directions for study.

Terrorism informatics has been defined as the application of advanced methodologies, information fusion and analysis techniques to acquire, integrate process, analyze, and manage the diversity of terrorism-related information for international and homeland security-related applications. It is a highly interdisciplinary and comprehensive field. The wide variety of methods used in terrorism informatics are derived from Computer Science, Informatics, Statistics, Mathematics, Linguistics, Social Sciences, and Public Policy, and these methods are involved in the collection of huge amounts of many types of multi-lingual information from varied and multiple sources. Information fusion and information technology analysis techniques, which include data mining, data integration, language translation technologies, and image and video processing, play central roles in the prevention, detection, and remediation of terrorism.

The purpose of this special issue is to bring together international researchers, engineers, policy makers, and practitioners working on terrorism informatics as well as related fields such as the organizational and social sciences. This special issue will outline the major challenges in supporting terrorism prevention, detection and response worldwide, as well as future perspectives on counterterrorism research in the information age.

Topics

The special issue will cover the scope of research relevant to terrorism informatics, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Terrorism knowledge portals and databases
• Terrorist incident chronology databases
• Terrorism social network analysis, visualization and simulation
• Terrorism analytical tools and methodologies
• Terrorism data mining and text mining
• Terrorism root cause analysis
• Bioterrorism
• Cyber terrorism
• Forecasting terrorism
• Countering terrorism
• Impact of terrorism on society
• National and international security and webmetrics
• Web-based intelligence terrorism monitoring and event detection

Important Dates

• Submission deadline: July 31, 2009
• Notification of first round reviews: October 31, 2009
• Revised manuscripts due: December 31, 2009
• Final acceptance notification: March 31, 2010
• Submission of final paper: May 31, 2010
• Publication date: Fall 2010