Team Knowledge Interoperability in Maritime Interdiction Operations

Navy operations are increasingly composed of distributed teams and reach-back assets that collaborate over time and distance. Better collaboration tools are need to support team situation awareness and coordinate distributed tasking. Our solution, HERMES, consists of two major elements: the SLATE spatial messaging collaboration tool and a new concept called Workflow Coordinating Representations (WCRs) that supports task management and distributed workflow. SLATE imports mission documents, such as maps, images, and timelines, and allows users to share annotations on those documents. WCRs provide a communal representation of distributed group tasks where all operators can share information, and comment on the on-going activity. It explicitly supports collaboration by managing the data involved in the activity, presenting task status information, and providing a place for users to comment, critique, and review. HERMES is specifically designed for maritime interdiction operations, but the concepts apply broadly, including military patrols, civil and private security operations, emergency management, industrial plant management, and damage control. Phase II will consist of a spiral process of design, development, evaluation, and transition. Empirical scientific tests of the design will contribute to our theoretical understanding of small, distributed team collaboration and support technology.