COREnet: The Fusion of Social Network Analysis and Target Audience Analysis

The purpose of this capstone is to highlight and explain how the target audience analysis TAA process can be enhanced by incorporating aspects of influence theory, social movement theory SMT and social network analysis SNA. While a large body of literature addresses influence theory, SMT and SNA, little has been written within military information support operations MISO doctrine recognizing SNA in the analytical process. This capstone creates a method to apply SNA, SMT, and influence theory to existing MISO doctrine while also developing a scalable web-based application that assists with visualizing and analyzing open source data to draw meaningful conclusions and assist decision making on given operational problem sets. The web-based interface, COREnet, is a high fidelity prototype derived completely from open- source technology. The examples utilized are from a 2006 data set of an Indonesian terrorist network to demonstrate how SNA can be fully integrated into the TAA process.