SBIR-STTR Award

The military is moving toward a more agile command and support structure requiring flexible, responsive tools. To address the emerging needs of this updated structure, systems must be able to rapidly adapt to the needs of the group charged with solving a problem, and they must allow commanders to rapidly transform information into knowledge. Most decision support environments are stovepipes - systems where information is trapped in the applications that create it - and thus cannot adequately address these needs. Earlier work at MAYA Viz has established the viability of our approach to solving stovepiping problems through a robust and flexible information architecture, user-composible appliances, and a consistent interface physics. Our systems have been successful at promoting individual, local understanding of logistics and planning problems. In this paper, we propose developing a knowledge-level information architecture that aggregates ongoing analysis products according to command-level requirements. The proposed solution would allow commanders to bring isolated plans and assessments together in ways that inform and expand their knowledge of the status of local efforts The outcome will be government and commercial applications for monitoring the implications of information flow and an infrastructure for command-level decision-making. More generally, components for visualizing and navigating across multiple layers of disparate data spaces can be embedded in future applications in many domains.

Keywords:
composability, collaboration, decision support, information centricity, information liquidity, information architecture, stovepipes, visualizat

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 arose and 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 work products 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 commander could 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.

Keywords:
Composability, Composable, Collaboration, Decision Support, Visualization, Information Architec