The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has released a new version of its Global Terrorism Database (GTD), with an accompanying new website.
The GTD is an open-source database including information on terrorist events around the world. Unlike many other event databases, the GTD includes systematic data on domestic as well as transnational and international terrorist incidents that have occurred during this time period. 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 perpetrator. Over 80,000 of these incidents have been included in the updated database, and this information can be extracted from the database to provide reference data as it was after the attacks in Mumbai.
The previous versions of the database (GTD 1 and GTD 2) covered events that occurred from 1970 through 2004. The update to the GTD (http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/) synthesized previous versions and expanded the data to include events from 1970 through 2007. Annual updates will continue to be added in the future.