Opening Communication and Collaboration for Space Situation Awareness with the OpenSpace Toolkit

Counterspace efforts will become increasingly important as advances in technology intensify our reliance on space-based assets and as adversaries develop improved methods to threaten these assets. Maintaining holistic situation awareness will be particularly important in counterspace pursuits due to the number and diversity of organizations supplying and utilizing these assets. Since human operators and experts will provide the foundation for situation awareness, communication and collaboration within and across organizational boundaries will be particularly important. A significant barrier to collaboration is seeking out and initiating communication with individuals who have the knowledge and experience needed to increase awareness. We propose an approach to initiating and improving collaboration for space situation awareness that is unique in its focus on discovering expertise that is embedded in organizational resources and its use of state-of-the-art semantic and social networking technologies. We will focus our research on developing tools and algorithms used to (1) extract awareness of domain knowledge, organizational structure and individuals expertise from available resources; (2) build a semantic and social network that describes this knowledge, along with intelligent algorithms to search it for appropriate individuals; and (3) assist users in seeking out and initiating communication with other individuals, even across organizational boundaries.   BENEFIT: Our significant long-term goal is to enable improved threat and impact awareness for immediate, short- and long-term situation understanding. Many aspects of this problem need to be addressed for its success. One aspect that is often overlooked is discovering and initiating communication with the human individuals who have knowledge and expertise that would improve situational awareness. This problem is significant across all domains where knowledge sharing is important. The number of relevant domains that would benefit from our approach is limitless, but includes crisis management, counterterrorism, cyber space protection, energy systems management, and research, healthcare and business intelligence.