Information Management Staff Toolkit

In a network-centric infosphere, a mix of powerful information processing applications, high-speed networks, and human analysis transforms vast quantities of disparate information into knowledge required to make intelligent decisions. Administering this mix involves a complex combination of policies, communications interfaces, and metrics. Stanfield Systems has successfully demonstrated zoomable, direct manipulation visual interfaces and collaborative agents for managing information flow and administering policy in an experimental Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI). In Phase II of this project, we continue to enhance our visual information management tools. We engineer our zoomable interfaces and collaborative agents into a plug-and-play visualization toolkit that can be customized by information managers using a drag-and-drop visual interface. Leveraging our plug-and-play toolkit architecture, we develop additional displays for visually specifying information queries and browsing search results. We develop additional collaborative agents for aggregating statistical information and analyzing the quality of information flowing through an infosphere. We target our visualization and collaborative agent capabilities toward meeting the information management requirements of the JBI. We validate the effectiveness of our visual displays for offloading cognitive processing from the mind of JBI information managers. This leads to improved task performance when administering, analyzing, and troubleshooting the JBI or other complex information spaces.