Precision Information Environment for Collaborative Emergency Support (PIECES)

Decision makers responding to homeland security incidents must rapidly integrate and manage dynamic, time-sensitive information from a large number of heterogeneous and multimodal information sources accessed through a variety of software applications, all while collaborating in real-time as efficiently as possible. To address these issues, we propose to design and evaluate a Precision Information Environment for Coordinated Emergency Support (PIECES). Four core components characterize our approach. First, we will streamline access to multiple information resources by building PIECES on a software framework that can fuse heterogeneous information sources and present these sources through a single access point. Second, we will support the manipulation, understanding, and exploitation of correlated data sources by providing users with an integrated view of the data through advanced, human-centered, multimodal display tools within a fully tailorable environment. Third, we will support collaboration between teams of local and distributed personnel by providing a collaborative work environment that lets teams share and manipulate data sources in real-time, then digitally capture collaborative output. Fourth, we will assess the feasibility of our approach by leveraging existing in-house technology and other systems to rapidly design and prototype conceptual information display tools and collaborative capabilities for the PIECES system.