For more than three years, Syria has been crippled by a bloody civil war that has laid waste to cities and exacted a heavy civilian toll.

But because reporting in Syria is so dangerous, the bloodletting has largely taken place away from the media spotlight.

One group of researchers, though, is determined to document every single killing.

Through painstaking data-gathering and assiduous verification, the group Syrian Tracker has tallied 111,915 deaths in the course of the conflict so far.

Syria Tracker gets reports from eyewitnesses and volunteers on the ground. Researchers also cull data from news reports.

The database has yielded some important insights such as possible war crimes committed by the Syrian regime.

Working in collaboration with researchers from the nonprofit organization SumAll.org, the researchers discovered that more women were getting killed in the conflict. In April of 2011, women made up only 1% of those killed. Today, 13% of victims are women, according to the latest data.

Image: SumAll

Those numbers alone don't tell the whole story, though. Taking a closer look at how women were killed, the researchers discovered a pattern. Women weren't random victims of bombings for example. Instead, many were killed by snipers, indicating a deliberate policy to go after female civilians, which would constitute a war crime.

Data on how children were killed suggest a similar conclusions. Of the thousands killed in the conflict, at least 700 have been summarily executed and tortured, and about 200 boys under the age of 13 have been killed by sniper fire, according to the data.

"It's a systematic way of killing," says Taha Kass-Hout, one of the founders of Syria Tracker. "The individuals who committed those crimes really knew what they were doing."

Syrian civilians walk near buses used as an anti-sniper's bullets protection in the Bustan Al Qasr area of the northern city of Aleppo, on May 6, 2013. Image: AFP/Getty Images

The initial idea for Syrian Tracker was born out of a simple question: "How do we get the word out on what is going on?" says Kass-Hout, a 41-year-old American of Syrian descent. Since very little information was available about what was happening, the goal of Syrian Tracker was to create a platform where citizens could report directly what was going on on the ground, using crowdsourcing tools.

The organization gets no external funding but relies entirely on volunteers, according to Kass-Hout, who says the core team numbers about ten people, with hundreds of others helping out when they can.

In the three and a half years that Kass-Hout and his collaborators have been collecting data, they have amassed more than 100,000 eyewitness reports and their custom-built algorithm has sifted through 180 million tweets and around 200,000 news articles, according to Kass-Hout.

An injured child waits to treated at a makeshift hospital following reported shelling by Syrian government forces in Douma, northeast of Damascus, on August 3, 2014. Image: Abd Doumany/AFP/Getty Images

All reports carry a date, a location of the attack and have been corroborated by one or more separate sources. Most also have the name of the victims. Many of the reports also feature video or photographs.

Deaths are grouped into categories such as "artillery," bombardment" or "torture," making it easier to spot trends or patterns.

In collaboration with Syrian Tracker, SumAll.org has created an interactive dashboard that can help researchers, journalists and activists visualize the ocean of data.

"Open data is only useful when it can be used by anyone," Stefan Heeke, the Executive Director of SumAll.org, told Mashable.

SumAll's interactive dashboard (based on TIBCO Spotfire) is embedded below.