A Decision Support Tool for Conflict Resolution Management

In general. "Politography" refers to the study or portrayal of political events, figures, and systems. It is used to analyze political trends, to visualize data, and create a data driven narrative. Decision support tools (DST) tend to be narrowly defined in terms of specific domain applications, in contrast to dashboards which ofer panoramic views of organizations or simple data sets with indicators. Herer, we describe the design and construction of a DST for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It provides a comprehensive data set and case study that can be generalized to other applications. The DST, labeled T-Politography, that integrates over 11000 indicators organisedin a hierarchical structure that includes a specific geographical area labeled A, B, and C in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. These have distinct legal status specified in the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians Authority (PA). The second level of the DST hierarchy consists of three domains that characterize Israeli and Palestinian levels of control, in each one of the geographic areas: security, geo-spatial, and economic. In addition, the T-Politography DST contains contextual data relevant to the extend of Israeli and Palestinian control such as political, diplomatic, social, and legal domains. . Each category is represented by a set of specific indicators, e.g., birth rates of Israelis in Area C. Section 1 provides some background, section 2 identifies the DST user groups, section 3 covers methodological components, section 4 is the DST data and case atudy covered in this paper and section 5 is a scenario analysis using Bayesian networks. The paper concludes with a discussion.