Fusion, Management, and Visualization Tools for Predictive Battlespace Awareness and Decision Making

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this Phase II is to develop a working prototype of the HADRian tool that can assist SOC (Sensing Operations Center) Operators, the persons responsible for the display of information within an EOC (Emergency Operations Center) COP (Common Operational Picture) during a Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief (HA/DR) operation in providing information for the COP to support the EOC commander and Incident commander. The tool will allow the operator to make information accessible to the COP by leveraging metadata annotations describing the repository with respect to an ontology. The ontology provides a formal representation (OWL) of the conceptual domain. Repositories of information are annotated with respect to this ontology in order to enable the system to (1) Infer which repositories are relevant to a high level query (statement of information need), based on the situation at hand; (2) Formulate queries for each relevant repository that (partially) satisfy the information need expressed in the high level query; (3) Reason about the results returned by the queried relevant repositories in order to filter out irrelevant items: (4) Transform the remaining results so they can be displayed within a common COP. BENEFIT: It is desirable (although very difficult) to have the ability to adapt a COP (Common Operational Picture) application to include new information sources and to display the information therein in an effective manner for HA/DR decision makers, including Emergency Operations Center commanders and field responders. This kind of feature is not part of the currently available EOR systems. Our proposed solution is to capture adequate metadata about available repositories in a format that supports automated reasoning in order to support identifying relevant repositories automatically, filtering and transforming their data, and display the results, thus mitigating the problem. The necessary metadata annotation must be simpler and more efficient than developing custom software adapters for new metadata repositories. We anticipate that this technology will be useful in integrating novel information into COPs of many kinds; particularly, those used in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief or emergency management operations. The benefit of this technology is the improved responsiveness of emergency responders, better and more timely decisions, and in the end, even saving of lives.