Tech Reports

Tech Report KMI-06-07 Abstract

Co-OPR: Design and Evaluation of Collaborative Sensemaking and Planning Tools for Personnel Recovery
Techreport ID: KMI-06-07
Date: 2006
Author(s): Austin Tate, Simon Buckingham Shum, Jeff Dalton, Clara Mancini, Albert Selvin

Personnel recovery teams must operate under intense pressure, taking into account not only hard logistics, but 'messy' factors such as the social or political implications of a decision. The Collaborative Operations for Personnel Recovery (Co-OPR) project has developed decision-support for sensemaking in such scenarios, seeking to exploit the complementary strengths of human and machine reasoning. Co-OPR integrates the Compendium sensemaking-support tool for real time information and argument mapping, with the I-X artificial intelligence planning and execution framework to support group activity and collaboration. Both share a common model for dealing with issues, the refinement of options for the activities to be performed, handling constraints and recording other information. The tools span the spectrum from being very flexible with few constraints on terminology and content, to knowledge-based relying on rich domain models and formal conceptual models (ontologies). In a personnel recovery experimental simulation of an UN peacekeeping operation, with roles played by military planning staff, the Co-OPR tools were judged by external evaluators to have been very effective.

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection