Collaborative Knowledge Management for Net-Centric Systems

While the Armed Forces are successfully moving toward net-centric systems that provide vast amounts of real-time information about a situation, the distributed human users’ capabilities to collaboratively create and share knowledge from that information has not received the attention it warrants. What is first needed is an understanding of the cognitive principles, grounded in empirical science, that govern collaborative knowledge management in distributed teams. Then, those principles may be used to develop technologies that support teams’ abilities to collaboratively create, recognize, share, and otherwise manage the knowledge they have. The central objective of the proposed research is to apply cognitive theory to the development of a suite of technologies that will support and maintain shared situation awareness (SA) among a distributed team of warfighters. Fundamental to our approach is the assumption that team meta-knowledge is a key factor that determines successful collaborative knowledge management and shared SA. The proposed Phase I research is designed to further study the cognitive processes of team meta-knowledge, team awareness, and shared SA, as well as develop prototype IA, bot, and visualization technologies.