|
In the 1980s and 1990s, Peru was the site of many violent terrorist actions
by a leftist group known as Sendero Luminoso, or the Shining Path. General Felipe
Gutierrez, the military attache from Peru, played a key role in anti-terrorist
actions that eventually succeeded in defeating the Shining Path movement. General
Gutierrez has been working in conjunction with the LCCD to model the conditions
that cause activist groups to escalate to the use of terrorism. With the
expertise of General Gutierrez, the LCCD has created a preliminary "Country Ontology Portal," in which
we are using the Shining Path as an initial guide towards what a general terrorism
ontology should contain. The "Country Ontology Portal" will eventually be
available online such that users, i.e. anti-terrorism personnel or political
scientists, will be able to interactively modify the ontology, as well as
add their own instances of a terrorist group model to the database.
By associating probabilty ranges with each level in the ontology, we will be
able to construct SOMA rules from the instances in the datbase. Using the
SOMA system, we will then be able to build opponent models for terrorist agents. These models can be used as the foundation of a terrorism early warning system, helping experts predict and react to groups that might soon begin using
terrorism as a political tool.
|