Data Warehouse A data warehouse is a database that stores current and historical data of potential interest to decision makers throughout the company. [1] In the Terrorist Watch List Database case, the information about suspected terrorists are consolidated and standardized from multiple government agencies so that the information can be centralized into a single list, from which different agencies can communicate and share information with each other.
This centralized database is a specific example of data warehouse.
In this case, the data warehouse containing the relevant information of individuals from each agency’s list enhancing effectiveness of communication between agencies as well as increase the consistency of information from separate databases. 1. 3 Business Intelligence Helping end users to make better business decisions by analyzing, consolidating and providing access to vast amounts of data through a series of tools is referred to Business Intelligence.
[2] BI process usually provides users the internal relationship of data so that enable users to see the patterns, relationships and insights of the data and make better decisions.
In the Terrorist Watch List Database case, according to the standard provided in the data mining of the database, information can be correctly classified multi-dimensional. For instance, the information on the watch list can be distributed to different government agency systems (e. g. FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA) to detect and trace the movement of suspects.
What is more, the information received by different agencies is pre-classified so as to fit the specific agency’s mission. The distribution and integration process involves classification of the information as well as multi-dimensional analysis processes.
These processes are all referred to Business Intelligence through which end users get consolidated analysis and get access to vast data. 1. 5 Databases and Database Management Systems Database is a collection of data organized to serve many applications efficiently by centralizing the data and controlling redundant data. [3] A data management system is software that permits an organization to centralize data and manage them efficiently as well as provide access to the stored data by application programs.
[4] “ Terrorist watch list” born in 2003 was a database of suspicious terrorists which centralized the information from different agencies.
We can appreciate the database management system in terrorist watch list from its daily update with new nominations, modifications and deletions of the terrorists who are no longer threatened. This process ensures the completeness and accuracy of the database. Meanwhile, the unification of the watch list streamlined the process of locating and apprehending terrorists and provided access to different agencies to join hands with tracing the terrorists.
3. Identify and describe 5 weaknesses of the terror watch list. What management, organization, and technology factors are responsible for these weaknesses? 20 marks) (1)The Terrorist Watch List lacks accuracy and adequacy of the information As the list contains inaccuracies and different governmental departments do not have uniform policies for nomination and removal, the separate agencies just populate their lists by widely collecting information from travelers; this will lead to a vast amount of misspellings and alternative variations of the suspicious terrorists’ names. The lack of accuracy of the list most commonly leads to misidentifications with names that are identical or similar to names on the watch list.