User:BLP1988/sandbox

History
The Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS) was the US government's database on tracking acts of terrorism. It contained details about incidents of violence against civilians and non-combatants (including military personnel and assets outside of war-like settings) from publicly viewable information.

The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) discontinued WITS in 2012 and was merged into the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), which can be downloaded from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) website at the University of Maryland.

Data Collection
When collecting data WITS addresses two areas of concern: it practices basic knowledge management techniques to ensure consistency in data collection and it casts a wider net on political violence than what may be considered terrorism. Casting a wider net ensures all candidate events are given fair consideration. Data was collected in a variety of ways. "The NCTC gathers data from open sources manually using commercial subscription news services, the USG's Open Source Center (OSC), local news websites reported in English, and, as permitted by the linguistic capabilities of the team, local news websites reported in foreign languages." Team members on the NCTC read and review each and every article that is found. A senior intelligence analyst provides quality control over his or her team. The senior analyst reviews each article to maintain consistency before publishing to the database.

"To reduce interpretation bias further (or increase inter-rater reliability), NCTC has analysts maintain account notes of commonly used terms and phrases found in the press, recurring political and ethnic issues, terrain notes, weather related trends, and other factors that influence a mastery of context surrounding acts of violence in countries assigned to their area of responsibility."

To ensure WITS gives fair and proper consideration to all the events available in open source, WITS collects information on attacks that have any indications of terrorism.

Humans & Computers - The Decision Making Theory
NCTC designed the WITS data coding process to make the best use of humans and computers. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that statistical models based on expert human judgment in older cases tend to outperform the same expert human judgment in newer cases. John Wiggle says, "Studies show that humans are good at categorizing and recognizing discrete objects and concepts, but often lack the ability to make effective aggregate judgments." Being able to use humans and computers allows analysts to separate data quickly and effectively to determine what is or is not an act of violence. Analysts can then code them into the database, and the WITS system can then make a logical decision on whether the act meets the criteria for terrorism. Having the computer assist NCTC with what is or is not terrorism allows an analyst to compare the computer’s answer with human thinking about the attack.

Content
of September 2010, WITS contained over 68,939 records.

A user of the website could search for information using different key terms in the search bar:


 * City
 * Country
 * Date
 * Event Type
 * Facility Type
 * Facility Characteristics
 * Facility Damage
 * Geocode Anchor
 * Geocode Country
 * Geocode Province
 * Group Type
 * ICN: An incident number of form YYYYMMDDXX
 * Incident Group Type
 * Incident Subject
 * Incident Summary
 * Incident Year
 * Included Facility Defining Characteristics
 * Included Facility Nationalities
 * Included Facility Targeted Characteristics
 * Included Group Nationalities
 * Perpetrator Characteristics
 * Perpetrator Confidence
 * State/province
 * Region
 * Related Term
 * Victim Characteristics
 * Victim Incident Country
 * Victim Type
 * WITS Child Record ParentID
 * Weapon