A System for Enabling Distributed Visualization and Collaboration (EDVAC)

Modern military operations rely on the ability of intelligence personnel to manage large volumes of dynamic information from heterogeneous sources. The intelligence process is necessarily a cooperative effort, and collaborative reasoning about that data and its visual representations must be efficient across display systems. One promising approach to improving the design of collaborative display systems is to exploit how operators use and share qualifiers of information, or meta-information. We propose to design and demonstrate a system for Enabling Distributed Visualization and Collaboration (EDVAC). Three core components characterize our approach. First, we will perform a cognitive task analysis on a specific scenario to develop a structured categorization of sources and types of information and meta-information, and identify difficulties in collaboration within modern DoD systems. Second, we will develop a system to augment incoming data with meta-information, create user-customized meta-information visualizations on collaborative displays, and provide analysts with interfaces to share meta-information visualizations. Third, we will design a methodology to assess the effectiveness of these techniques. We will leverage our team’s expertise in the development of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) systems and complex display systems to rapidly design the proposed system and develop novel collaborative visualization techniques.