Toolkit for Role-aware Exchange of Knowledge

In a dynamic environment, it is important to support changing membership of groups, allow on-the-fly team building, and tailor information presentation. Information overload concerns in real-time interactions require presenting the right information to the right user at the right time. Our approach is to model users, the roles users fulfill, task models, and task context to allow a customized view of information for each participant. The result of the Phase I project was a prototype groupware system for Time-Sensitive Targeting (TST) based on TREK, a Toolkit for Role-aware Exchange of Knowledge. This system aided users in maintaining shared awareness of tasks and roles. Under Phase II, we plan to expand TREK with a thorough investigation of the TST domain and the construction of models using Concept Mapping as well as ontological representation and reasoning tools. We plan to include intelligent systems for automated filtering and discovery of information and tailoring of representations. We foresee transitioning TREK to a Network Centric Warfare (NCW) environment via the incorporation of agent-based interaction. We envision these distributed software agents gathering information and negotiating routine aspects of remote coordination, aiding the transition of TREK-based systems to the distributed paradigm of NCW.