Visual Representation and Implementation of Culturally Significant Information for Enhanced Tactical Decision-making

This proposal is to develop a Cultural Information and Value Visualization System (CIVVS) that will provide new and powerful tools for analyzing, selecting, and visualizing critical cultural factors and applying them immediately in the context of military tactical planning. By integrating multi-dimensional visualization of culturally significant information with decision analytical modeling that imbeds cultural factors, CIVVS will enhance the quality and speed of tactical decision-making in foreign, culturally unknown and untried, and potentially hostile environments. CIVVS will support the visualization of tactically significant cultural information and values. It will do so by innovatively integrating and enhancing two sets of support systems previously developed Perceptronics: The first for cultural data acquisition and the second for tactical planning and decision making. Furthermore, CIVVS will include three visualizations that show how these information types interact with one another and with planning and decision making: (4) Visualization of a course of action as a region within a cultural space; (5) Visualization of cultural schemata or narratives can be visualized as causal networks; and (6) Visualization of uncertainty regarding the cultural impact of a candidate COA by representations in cultural value space. All six displays will be designed for both perceptual and cognitive usability.