The Institute for the Study of Violent Groups is a ten-year open source research effort whose primary focus has been to maintain the world's most comprehensive database on violent extremism and transnational crime worldwide. With a decade of experience aggregating data, ISVG has created a unique relational database structure methodology for categorizing information related to violent extremism and transnational crime. ISVG's database structure pulls 1,500 variables per incident to ensure the capture of the most minutiae of information, ensuring the ability to identify relationships between what seem to be unrelated incidents. ISVG applies its database structure methodology to proprietary information as well as numerous kinds of research, allowing for a variety of data to be consolidated, discovered and visualized as one picture.

The ISVG violent extremism and terrorism database currently contains information on over 223, 000 incidents, whereby 43,000 unique individuals have links to over 3,000 distinct groups. The database is geospatially and temporally tagged supporting the production of link association, temporal, statistical and geospatial visualizations.