Supporting Civil-Military Information Integration in Military Operations Other than War

Paul Smart, Alistair Russell and Nigel Shadbolt

http://sa.aktivespace.org/

AKTiveSA

• Part of DIF DTC initiative• Allied to the AKT initiative

• exploitation of AKT technologies

• Enhance situation awareness in MOOTW (humanitarian relief) operations

• Combine semantic technologies with advanced visualization capabilities• user interface is key element of

situation awareness• user interaction may be key

part of problem solving competence – ‘epistemic action’

Overview

• Humanitarian and disaster relief operations

• Afghanistan• Humanitarian events

• earthquake• dam failure

• Background military conflict • coalition operations against Taliban

insurgents • Why not Binni?

• actual events serve as context for knowledge acquisition

• exploitation of real-world resources• knowledge models as reusable

components• Scenario Development

• rapid prototyping with Google Earth client and KML

29/03/2002 12:00 30/03/2002 00:00

13:00 14:00 15:00 16:00 17:00 18:00 19:00 20:00 21:00 22:00 23:00

12:10Baghlan Earthquake

12:48Blackhawk Helicopter

Dispatched to Baghlan (RECCE)

13:12Earthquake Field Report

From RECCE15:10

Nimrod Reports Flooding

15:55Flood Field Report (RECCE)

16:48News Reports

of Crisis

17:28 - 20:00Relief Effort Planning

20:00 - 00:00Assembly of Relief Effort

15:24Dispatch of Blackhawk

Helicopter to Flood Zone (RECCE)

This phase of the relief effort involves the assimilation of available information for planning purposes.

This phase of the relief effort entails the sourcing of aid supplies and the coordination of the relief effort in terms of transport and logistics,

17:28Emergency Operations

Centre Established

18:00Dispatch of 12

Mechanized Brigade

Band Sultan Dam Scenario

• Multiple knowledge domains, e.g.• humanitarian aid• meteorology• military operations/equipment

• Knowledge capture (LWC/RSA)• military experts• public domain sources

• institutional web sites• SOP manuals• technical reports

• Knowledge representation• OWL DL ontologies• CLIPS rules

• Knowledge Web• delivered to UK forces in Afghanistan

Knowledge Acquisition & Modelling

Technology Components

• Knowledge Repository• Windows-based triplestore• semantic query interface• HTTP interface

• Symbol Generation Utility• NATO standard military symbols• alignment of symbol identification

codes with semantic-level representations

• Reasoning Subsystem• inference & decision support

services• performance issues!

• AKTiveSA TDS Client• 3D visualizations• semantic filters

Information Integration

Integrated Knowledge

Base

Local Ontologies

End User Applications

Information Sources

AKTiveSA TDS Client

System Evaluation

• Favourable feedback from military stakeholders• Visualization capabilities vs. knowledge processing• More work required for:

• content acquisition• decision support• predictive capabilities

• Situation awareness evaluation• human factors evaluation – University of Cardiff, UK• recommended user interface manipulations• are current conceptions of individual situation awareness

really applicable to coalition situations where the emphasis is on team situation awareness?

Future Work

• Mobile Capabilities• portable devices• mobile information access

• Resource classification• Content acquisition

• knowledge extraction from textual sources

• Artequakt

• Virtual Adviser• ‘conversational’ context for

information exchange• multi-model stimuli and dual task

performance• vocal alerts less obtrusive than

popups or visual ‘assistants’?• Rule execution

• inference engine optimization• more control of rule firing

Multi-Touch Capability

Summary

• Good infrastructure for further development• knowledge repository• symbol generation• scenario development and

visualization capabilities• suite of user interface

component• pluggable component

architecture• Key challenges

• real-time knowledge extraction

• decision support

• Funding for additional development

• Operational focus areas• humanitarian relief• information operations• humanitarian demining• EOD

• Requirements• input from subject matter

experts• decision support focus

areas• testing, evaluation &

feedback• actual scenarios and case

studies