VICTR-E: Visualizations for Integrating, Communicating and Tracking Reasoning Electronically

As recent military missions make clear, intelligence gathering at the company level and below is essential to obtaining critical information about the socio-cultural environment. To accomplish this goal, there is an urgent need for tools to support the collaboration among these lower echelon operators in the task of collecting and analyzing socio-cultural information. Effective collaboration requires the communication of not just the findings of an analysis, but also the chain of reasoning that produced them. To address these needs, Aptima proposes to develop VICTR-E: Visualizations for Integrating, Communicating and Tracking Reasoning Electronically. VICTR-E will enable Company Intelligence Support Teams (COISTs) to inspect the range of intelligence data available to them, group related reports together, and develop graphical hypotheses or arguments that can be shared with analysts at higher echelons. Collaboration between COISTs and data gathers at the small unit level is also facilitated by VICTR-E through interactive mechanisms that allow rapid dissemination of collection requirements and retrieval of responses. Additionally, VICTR-E will support collaboration among COISTs though a workspace where analysts can create custom representations of the entities and complex relationships found in cultural data.