START’s Unconventional Weapons and Technology (UWT) division is announcing the creation of their new CBRN Data Suite and Portal, which will become accessible online in December.
The Data Suite includes an event-level and an actor-level dataset. The event-level dataset is based on UWT’s Profiles of Incidents Involving CBRN and Non-state Actors (POICN) database, and is scheduled to be updated through May 2022 by the time the Data Suite and Portal goes live at the end of the year.
The actor-level dataset is a newly created dataset modeled after the Chemical and Biological Non-State Adversaries Database (CABNSAD) and the Radiological and Nuclear Non-State Adversaries (RANNSAD) dataset, with the new CBRN Actor dataset subsuming both CABNSAD and RANNSAD. As with the event-level dataset, the actor-level dataset is scheduled to be updated through May 2022 by the time the Data Suite and Portal launch.
UWT Director Steve Sin, who is the project’s principal investigator, noted that the CBRN Data Suite and Portal represents a much-needed evolution for the non-state actor CBRN databases UWT has previously developed.
“This project not only allows us to bring the data up to date and continue to update the data going forward, but it also allows us to update the types of data being collected for these datasets – something we have always wanted to do but were previously unable to,” Sin said. “Most importantly, this project will provide, to practitioners and researchers alike, increased accessibility to the datasets.”
Although the Data Suite and Portal are not scheduled to launch until December of this year, the UWT team is already taking advantage of the opportunity this project has provided. Project Technical Lead Markus Binder will be presenting a paper he authored that provides analysis of data contained in the event-level dataset at the CBRNe Convergence 2022 Conference in November.
Until the Data Suite and Portal launch in December, the data is only available for government use. Those working on official government tasks who would require access to the data before December can reach out to Binder at poicn@umd.edu.