Meta-Information Representations In Advanced Modeling and Simulation (MIRIAM)

Modern military operations increasingly require commanders to reason about large amounts of complex information – a task made more challenging due to meta-information (i.e., characteristics of information) such as uncertainty, staleness, etc. that adds to the decision-making burden. Knowledge regarding this meta-information and methods for effectively portraying it have the potential to not only relieve the decision-maker’s workload, but also to encourage more battlespace-aware decisions. Therefore, we propose to design and demonstrate a system to develop Meta-Information Representations for use In Advanced Modeling and Simulation (MIRIAM). Three core components characterize our approach. First, we will perform a work domain analysis on a specific scenario to develop a structured categorization of sources and types of information and meta-information, to define which types are required by the commander, and to identify DoD modeling and simulation systems that require meta-information representation. Second, we will design and demonstrate a toolkit to augment incoming data with meta-information and to support rapid prototyping of novel visualization techniques. Third, we will design a methodology to assess the effectiveness of these techniques. We will leverage our team’s expertise in the development of complex display systems to rapidly design and use the proposed toolkit to develop novel meta-information visualization techniques.