ABSTRACT
Our discussion of counter-terrorism is rather preliminary. We are not claiming to be counter-terrorism experts. The information on terrorist threats we have presented here have been obtained entirely from unclassified newspaper articles and news reports that have appeared over the years. Our focus is to illustrate how data mining could help toward combating terrorism. We are not saying that data mining solves all the problems. But because data mining has the capability to extract often previously unknown patterns and trends, we should certainly explore the various data mining and Web mining technologies for counter-terrorism. Note that we have discussed both data mining and Web mining. As we have stated, for us Web mining goes beyond data mining. It not only includes data mining techniques, but also focuses on Web traffic and usage mining as well as Web structure mining. That is, there are additional challenges for Web mining that are not present for just data mining. Furthermore, Web mining also includes mining structured data as well as unstructured data. Furthermore, we have stated that much of the data will eventually be on the Web, whether in public networks such as the Internet or in private corporate intranets and classified intranets. Therefore, studying Web mining encompasses studying data mining as well.
