SIMKAP: Situation and Mission-responsive Knowledge Access Portal

The modern organizational and operational structures emerging within the US Army will require revolutionary transformations of the informational tools supporting the tasks of the new units. Knowledge access portals will become instrumental in gaining rapidsituational understanding, and in making decisions leading to success in a wide range of operations. Unlike general-purpose portals, knowledge access portals designed for use in operational contexts need to respond to specific situation and missioncharacteristics. To support this need for context-sensitive knowledge access we propose the development of a Situation and Mission-responsive Knowledge Access Portal (SIMKAP) for the Brigade Combat Team. The portal encodes access-knowledge that capturesthe type of information and domain-knowledge needs specific to given situations and missions, as well as the specific knowledge access, navigation, and visualization modes that best support the associated cognitive processes of the decision-maker. TheSIMKAP platform will select and customize knowledge sources, knowledge navigation and access capabilities, and services matching the decision-maker's tasks in specific operational modes, and will take into account the constraints and major requirementsimposed by the associated contexts. The development effort will comply with DII-COE standards, and will integrate with existing US Army knowledge and information repositories.The proposed effort has significant potential aplications, both as a technologyand as an end-product. As a technology the approach will provide tools for context-based knowledge access, in response to a decision-maker's task characteristics and task context. Candidate domains range from command and control centers, to corporateknowledge access, engineering design projects, and educational tool development. As an end-product, the associated knowledge engineering tools will support on-going DoD efforts to develop powerful command and control tools that will enable the warfighterto take rapid, and informed decisions in complex, real-time situations.