VISTOLOGY, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen many emergency response situations in which the US milit

Description

ABSTRACT: Recent years have seen many emergency response situations in which the US military has played an important role. These include Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (2005), the devastating earthquake in Haiti (2010), and the tsunami and resulting nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan (2011,"Operation Tomodachi"). In all of these cases, US military forces have stepped in quickly to provide needed aid and support to rescue and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief (HA/DR) missions. Responding to HA/DR situations requires a Common Operating Picture (COP) for situation awareness. Situation awareness involves the identification and monitoring of relationships among objects participating in an evolving situation. In general, tracking the relationship of every set of entities in a situation is intractable, since there are too many of them. Instead, a COP provides a visualization of the situation, usually by means of frequently or automatically updated geospatial map overlays that depict the events and entities at issue and the geospatial relations between them. A shared COP allows for distributed planning, tasking and execution of courses of action to respond to, recover from, prepare for and mitigate hazards to civilians and property due to some disaster. Our plan is to use semantic technologies, in the form of annotating resources in terms of an OWL ontology of entities, times, and places, in order to find, filter, merge, display and store information in HA/DR COPs. We will leverage an existing state of the art HA/DR COP for our experiments in this area. BENEFIT: If successful, this technology will facilitate the deployment, management, and after-action review of HA/DR COPs by allowing users to more easily find, filter, merge, display and store information in an HA/DR COP. The resulting technologies and techniques should be useful in other context in which a Common Operating Picture is required, such as in law enforcement or in quickly mounting short-term campaigns with a geospatial dimension, perhaps in marketing or financial services.