Enhancing IPB with Representations of Meta-information (EPROM)

Modern military operations increasingly require decision-makers to reason predicatively about adversary actions and the battlespace environment – a task made more challenging due to meta-information (i.e., qualities of information such as uncertainty or staleness). Understanding the role of meta-information in reasoning about intelligence and developing methods for effectively portraying it has the potential to improve the interpretation and dissemination of intelligence and therefore to encourage more battlespace-aware decisions. Therefore, we propose to design, demonstrate, and evaluate methods for Enhancing IPB with Representations Of Meta-Information (EPROM). Three core components characterize our approach. First, we will perform a work domain analysis (WDA) in a specific military domain to define the perceptual and cognitive contexts that impact the role of meta-information in reasoning, and develop case studies to illustrate these impacts. Second, we will design meta-information visualization methods that explicitly address the defined contexts illustrated in the case studies. Third, we will develop a plan for evaluating these visualization methods and will perform pilot experiments to validate our approach. Our approach will be supported by the design of a software toolkit to aid in prototyping and evaluating visualization methods, and by the integration of these methods into existing and planned DoD battlespace display systems.