# Comprehensive Terrorism Database



## Snaquebite (Sep 8, 2007)

It is a newly released comprehensive terrorism database from the University of Maryland.

http://www.start.umd.edu/data/gtd/

The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world since 1970 (currently updated through 2004). Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on international as well as domestic terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period and now includes almost 80,000 cases. For each GTD incident, information is available on the date and location of the incident, the weapons used and nature of the target, the number of casualties, and -- when identifiable -- the identity of the perpetrator.

The START Center is making the GTD available to government policy makers and academics in an effort to increase understanding of terrorist violence so that it can be more readily defeated.

Characteristics of the GTD
Contains information on over 80,000 terrorist attacks 
The main types of information found in the GTD are items that you would expect to find in a well written newspaper story about a terrorist attack: the type of attack, the number of persons killed, the group claiming responsibility, the date of the event and so on 
The GTD is currently the most comprehensive unclassified data base on terrorist events in the world 
It includes information on more than 27,000 bombings, 13,000 assassinations, and 2,800 kidnappings 
The original data include information on over 45 variables; the new data include over 120 variables 
More than 75 data collectors with expertise in six language groups are currently engaged in collecting GTD data 
Data collection is supervised by an advisory panel of 12 terrorism research experts 
Over 2,000,000 news articles and 25,000 new sources were reviewed to collect GTD from 1998 to 2004 alone
The goal of START is to make all GTD data available to government employees immediately and to release all data to researchers approximately one year after the end of data collection 
The original GTD data base (1970-1997) is available to researchers through the Inter University Consortium for Political and Social Research


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