Hello

Digital
Bear Consulting has a very useful set of links to software tools in aid of
social network analysis. It's an area I discovered by accident, having
"rolled my own" link analysis software as a private utility. My
motivation was to keep track of the burgeoning network of events, persons and
other entities related to the Global War on Terror. The products listed out at
Digital Bear are far removed from my own amateurish attempts. For one thing,
they are founded on sound mathematical theory. I haven't had the time to look at
each closely, but they range from Analyst's
Notebook, a professional law enforcement and military package whose claim to
fame was helping track down Saddam Hussein at the high end to Agna
and NetVis Module, which
are freeware. There are also libraries and toolkits which can be adapted to
custom purposes. Other resources include
INSNA and its directory
of relevant software tools. Vladis
Krebs describes the motivation behind social network analysis.

Social network analysis [SNA] is the mapping and measuring of relationships
and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other
information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the
people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the
nodes. .. A method to understand networks and their participants is to
evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location
is finding the centrality of a node. These measures help determine the
importance, or prominence, of a node in the network.

While it sounds like something that would be extraordinarily useful in the
war on terror, I suspect the actual utility of many models and the tools based
on them will be quite limited by the quality of the data and its volatility. All
the same, there was never a tool without a use and while I don't expect that
these tools are used in the field to target Zarqawi's minions scuttling
around in Iraq, the concepts of "social networks" are probably
never far from mind.

The spiritual leader of a militant group that claimed to have beheaded two
American hostages in Iraq has been killed in a U.S. airstrike, and his
Jordanian family is preparing a wake, a newspaper and Islamic clerics said
Wednesday. Sheik Abu Anas al-Shami, 35, was killed when a missile hit the car
he was traveling in on Friday in the west Baghdad suburb of Abu-Ghraib, said
the clerics, who have close ties to the family. They spoke on condition of
anonymity.

Al-Shami was a close aide to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of the
militant group Tawhid and Jihad. The al-Qaida-linked group is blamed for some
of the biggest attacks in Iraq, including the bombing of the U.N. headquarters
last year, and the beheadings of foreign hostages -- including two Americans
this week.