Gray Matter: A Platform to Provide Timely, Relevant Information for Proactive Decision Making

Military domains, such as naval operations, require agile decision-making by Warfighters as they monitor ongoing activities, assess the impact of events, and develop or adjust plans to achieve the overall mission. These missions and resulting tasks emerge from a consistently evolving battlespace, placing demands on the Warfighter to adapt to make sense of the wealth of available battlespace data, often in the form of text-based reports and message traffic. However, current information management tools available to Warfighters are limited to address only a prescribed set of tasks and only then in narrow contexts. Warfighters need dynamic information management tools that enable them to categorize, enrich, reason over, and manage information transactions to provide timely, relevant information for decision-making. To meet this goal, we propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of Gray Matter, a platform for Warfighters to rapidly capture, reuse, and share workflows that can be discovered and applied based on anticipated information needs. Gray Matter provides a mashup authoring and execution capability that combines data access, information processing, communication, and visualization services, and the capacity to anticipate mashups that are contextually-relevant to the Warfighter.