background

Information Management
Dr. Ronald Larsen

Background: Situation Awareness, or Battlefield Awareness, is a key objective for the Defense community. It includes detection, tracking, classification, correlation, and extraction of information about threats and other entities from real-time sensor data streams and stored databases to provide an abstracted comprehensive, consistent view. Precise and timely situation awareness leads to appropriately targeted plans, which can subsequently provide the base for command & control, leading to successful accomplishment of objectives.

The key objectives of situation awareness are:

integration of multiple sources of information,
extraction of relevant information,
abstraction of extracted information into semantic units,
timeliness with respect to decision processes, and
consistency across diverse information sources.

The IM Program enhances situation awareness with correlation and manipulation across disciplines and among languages, including:

filtering information by relevancy to the problem context and value of content to the user, and
visualizing complex and abstract information spaces for highly facile navigation and retrieval.

The work conducted on Analysis Environments will result in broadly-available network-based services and freely-accessible software, continuing the tradition of broad dissemination of research results and products which has characterized DARPA's sponsored programs.

Reference implementations for interoperable, secure repositories will also be available. We anticipate that collaboration with other government organizations such as the Library of Congress and the Defense Technical Information Center will be instrumental in advancing the applicability and availability of these designs, as well as their availability to the broader community.

Information resources are growing exponentially in number and size. The analyst's attention has become the critical resource. The objective of the Information Management program is to provide the technological capability to get the most out of the analyst's attention in the least amount of time.

The analyst's job, by definition, is to rapidly and effectively understand the full dimensions of an unfolding situation. Real-time correlation and manipulation of an array of information resources, as addressed in this program, is critical to this task.

Deriving a comprehensive and accurate assessment of an international situation draws heavily on the skills of translators and linguists. Translingual aids enable the analyst to perform substantial filtering of multilingual information, relaxing their reliance on translators while leveraging the precious skills of the translators to those tasks where their skills are more essential.

The Information Management program strives to broadly increase the defense analyst's ability to work with a diverse and distributed array of information resources in order to understand and develop an appropriate response to time critical, crisis-driven situations.