The Basic Ordnance Observational Management System: geovisual exploration and analysis of improvised explosive device incidents

Abstract

This paper introduces the Basic Ordnance Observation Management System, a prototype application supporting geovisual exploration and analysis of improvised explosive device (IED) incidents. Use of IEDs by terrorist cells has increased in geographic scale, frequency, and sophistication due to the relative cheap cost of acquiring the materials and the ease in keeping such weaponry covert. The Basic Ordnance Observational Management System is designed to facilitate spatiotemporal sensemaking of the IED incident dataset maintained by the National Counter Terrorism Center, Worldwide Incident Tracking System. The application expands upon existing geovisual analytics tools for understanding patterns, trends, and anomalies in IED activity through provision of a suite of capabilities that include: flexible spatial and temporal aggregates of the IED dataset; linked spatial, temporal, and attribute views of the incident information; temporal re-expression, particularly the generation of linear and composite sequences of the IED dataset; and temporal animation across IED activity, with ‘VCR’ controls and an interactive temporal legend to control the animation as well as visual benchmarks to assist with interpretation of the animation.

Keywords:

• geovisual analytics
• sensemaking
• spatiotemporal visualization
• cartographic animation
• cartographic interaction
• visual benchmarks
• intelligence analysis
• improvised explosive devices

Acknowledgement

We thank Dr Alan MacEachren of the Penn State GeoVISTA Center for input and feedback on the application. We also thank Ben Finch for input on the initial conceptual design of the application. This material is based upon work supported by the US Department of Homeland Security under Award #2009-ST-061-CI0001.