Collaborative Visual Exploitation and Reasoning Tool (COVERT)

Company intelligence support teams (CoISTs) must successfully collect, analyze, report, and disseminate soft information from numerous heterogeneous sources through a variety of software applications, all while collaborating with other CoISTs and Battalion intelligence officers. To support these analysts, we propose to design and demonstrate the feasibility of a Collaborative Visual Exploitation and Reasoning Tool (COVERT). Four core components characterize our approach. First, we will enable CoIST analysts to exploit soft information by building COVERT on an extensible knowledge representation framework that supports the presentation and fusion of heterogeneous information sources through a single point of access. Second, we will enable the presentation, manipulation, and reasoning over multiple sources of information by providing analysts with an integrated view of the data through a set of advanced, human-centered display tools brought together within a tailorable information environment. Third, we will support collaboration between analysts by providing a work environment that supports real-time information sharing and manipulating via a collaborative visual analytics system. Fourth, we will assess the feasibility of our approach by designing and implementing a demonstration prototype in Phase I and defining an evaluation plan to more thoroughly assess our approach in Phase II.