POLECAT Documentation

The POLitical Event Classification, Attributes, and Types (POLECAT) dataset is the successor event dataset to the Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS). Event data consists of coded interactions between socio-political actors (i.e., cooperative or hostile actions between individuals, groups, sectors, and nation states). POLECAT uses a newly developed, machine-learning coder based on the Political Language Ontology for Verifiable Event Records (PLOVER) ontology to produce an event database by analyzing news stories in seven languages from over one-thousand sources across the globe. The database includes millions of time-stamped, geolocated events from 2018 onward, is updated hourly, and posted weekly. Each event includes several attributes, as defined in the included POLECAT Dictionary and PLOVER Manual. Please see the companion POLECAT Dataverse page at doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AJGVIT for associated data.