An Electronic Workspace for the Commander

Phase I of this STTR was undertaken with a vision of an environment where commanders could dynamically reconfigure information and teams to support tasks as they aroseand where that information would easily be visualized/manipulated to allow patterns of understanding to emerge.To realize this vision, we designed an approach that involved modular software components within a collaborative workspace. Within that evolving workspace, staff would use infocentric, expressive interfaces for their detailed problem-solving; the workproducts they created would effectively express their decisions to each other. As they worked out the details of their problems, these work products would synthesize their evolving understanding of the problem and their proposed solutions. The commandercould maintain topsight over his staff (in real time) without them producing explicit briefings as separate work products.Within this environment, commanders and staff could work with problems of varying scale, scope, and complexity and ad hoc teams could be assembled, work together, solve a problem, and capture and visualize their thinking and rationale.The Phase II goal is to build that prototype -- a working, testable, composable data and thought visualization and analysis environment. The ultimate goal is to make it possible for an end user (commander and/or staff) to understand and intuitively be able to create custom, collaborative, specialized visualizations on-the-fly, in minutes.