I don't know much about information technology but I'm game.

Let's see. Large scale information data warehousing has been around since the early 1960s. Some of the original database warehouses were built to handle fun things like payroll and finance. So, we've got a mature set of technologies. SAP and other companies have been building enterprise level data-warehouse systems with multiple levels of access that exist between physical and logical locations for quite awhile. Anybody though who has tried to roll out People Soft or similar can tell you this is not an easy task. The issue is not in the technology of delivery. The information technology exists to deliver the correct information to the correct individuals for analysis and/or action. Visual systems exist that do this within life critical systems currently. The Aviation Administration handles thousands of targets that have to be analyzed constantly with a good amount of accuracy. This is done over a large area with multiple sensors and tied into a backbone utilizing rule sets for delivery. Not close enough to the target use? Mail systems like HotMail, Gmail, and others do the same basic task but like the FAA example these are limited and the rule sets are finite.

The issue is the rule sets.

Can you succinctly describe terrorist behavior?

terrorist == male, adult, radicalized, weaponized

but wait if terrorist absolutely equals a male adult who is radicalized and has weapons what do we call a United States Marine?

So that suggests you need analysis that is fuzzy and each of the attributes needs to defined. So we end up with (simplistic examples)

terrorist.male = anti-american, violence prone, opportunist
terrorist.adult = old enough to push a button, decision aware, etc.
terrorist.radicalized = volunteered, choses violence, ???
terrorist.weaponized = has opportunity, can develop or deploy weapons

What happens next in the analysis phase (oh wait you mean you intelligence guys don't do it this way?) is that the COMPUTER needs rules. Computers are not very smart in fact they only do really stupid things really really fast. So, you tell it to do the wrong thing it will do it fast.

What you want is the edge cases. So for each attribute (e.g. terorrist.male) you are not looking to just get the male but the "edge" cases. Those males that have all the other factors. But, wait you say that females and children are terrorists too! Well of course. That is one of the rubs. You have to identify ALL terrorists. Take all of the known cases of terrorism and make similar rule sets. Somebody is reported you have terrorist.female.maoist.senior_citizen(reported) and that is your case that comes up before some human or stops them from getting on an aircraft. Though I wish they'd just not get a ticket. Oh and if you back through the logic you now know why no-fly lists are stupid and don't work.

I'm sure somebody has to have done this somewhere already. The above is a very simplistic semantic/ontological search and filter sequence based on object oriented techniques. To those of you with computer science degrees (I KNOW I BROKE THE RULES) but to everybody else I hope it made sense.

Then again I don't know much about this stuff so...