What is the Political and Economic Networks Observatory?

The Political and Economic Networks Observatory - (Syrian Program)


The Observatory for Political and Economic Networks is a platform for browsing the published, cumulative, and time-varying data on the people and organizations that shape the political and economic landscape and the interrelationships between them.


The Observatory is mainly based on a network knowledge base (knowledge graph) fed by big data. It contains interactive dashboards with systemic and network mapslogical, geographical, and temporalwhich result in advanced strategic and operational analyses, enabling our six target types of partners (in the fields of research, media, human rights, civil society, government, and business) to understand systems and macro-scenes, reveal strengths and empty spaces, develop scenarios, forecast the future, and plan.

The Syrian Program is the Observatory’s debut production, representing the unique landscape of Syria. The organizing framework for this programwhich contains dozens of projectsis to provide tools to help the different actors involved in Syria in building a more just and healthy society and country.

The Syrian program currently uses two main tools, a web application and a Network Interactive Browsing Tool called Linkurious, to provide outputs from the network knowledge base to beneficiaries.


Web Application

This is our website, whose main components are:

  • profiles of people and organizations
  • network views generated according to research questions
  • lists compiled by special categories
  • a search tool

Linkurious, the Network Interactive Browsing Tool

Linkurious is an advanced application for traversing network databases, using a special programming language that enables advanced analytics. It also contains geographical mapping and time tracking features to view the location of entities and how networks evolve over time.