BattleView: A Distributed System for Intelligent Integrated Hypermedia Presentation Services for the Digital Battlefield

A number of applications in other commercial as well as military sectors require that multiple distributed data sources be consulted when a specific need arises, and that the results of these consultations be presented to the user. Often, these results are complex and involve multiple documents. Presentation of such results involves automatically generating browsable documents so that the user can navigate through as well as manipulate a space of documents at the level of detail and/or with focus criteria that he is interested in. In this proposal, we will focus on the latter need and develop an integrated logical theory of hypermedia presentations. We will demonstrate this theory on battlefield applications where a commander may wish to track and manipulate changes in a region of the world. Based on the theory, we will build an implementation of a system called BattleView that automatically synthesizes hypermedia presentations paradigm will then be coupled to existing methods of consulting multimedia data sources (such as via the University of Maryland HERMES system) to provide and integrated querying cum presentation environment.