Team Knowledge Interoperability in Maritime Interdiction Operations Navy SBIR FY2008.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2008.1 Topic No.: N08-082 Topic Title: Team Knowledge Interoperability in Maritime Interdiction Operations Proposal No.: N081-082-0960 Firm: Pacific Science & Engineering Group, Inc. 9180 Brown Deer Road San Diego, California 92121-2238 Contact: Mark John Phone: (858) 535-1661 Web Site: www.pacific-science.com Abstract: Navy operations such as Maritime Interdiction Operations (MIOs) are increasingly composed of distributed assets that interact and collaborate over great distances. Not only must fielded assets coordinate information and actions, but reach-back assets that perform analysis functions play an increasingly large and common role. The collaboration tools that are in use today fail to meet many of the collaboration and cognition needs of users. In terms of recent models of team collaboration and knowledge interoperability (Warner, Letsky, & Cowen, 2005), these tools offer little explicit support for knowledge building, problem solving, or consensus building. We proposed to develop a tool called HERMES. The communication-collaboration tool will support team situation awareness and incorporate mixed-media messages and explicit design structures to support collaboration and knowledge interoperability within the MIO task environment. The tool is based on SLATE wireless collaboration technology. Along the way of developing the HERMES tool, the project will delve into the cognitive/collaborative activities of MIO team members in order to better understand these activities and how to better support them. In particular, the requirement of providing explicit interface designs to support collaboration will entail research into the macro-cognition and knowledge interoperability needs of these users. Benefits: The benefits of this approach are 1) it will be built on top of an established wireless collaboration technology called SLATE that is already well developed, and that offers several important benefits including very low bandwidth for communicating among distributed teams, good team situation awareness, , and effective collaboration support, 2) the project will involve original research into the collaboration activities of MIO users that will be used to develop explicit interface designs to support those activities, 3) an agile, iterative development process will be used to bring stakeholders into the design development early and often, and 4) Pacific Science and Engineering is a highly respected human factors company with a wealth of experience in the research, development, and evaluation of cutting edge interface designs. Each of these four factors lowers the risk and increases the opportunities for success for the project. Return