Business Intelligence Visualization System for Organizational Understanding, Analysis, and Collaboration (BIVOUAC) Navy SBIR FY2010.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2010.1 Topic No.: N101-103 Topic Title: Business Intelligence Visualization System for Organizational Understanding, Analysis, and Collaboration (BIVOUAC) Proposal No.: N101-103-0603 Firm: Charles River Analytics Inc. 625 Mount Auburn Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138-4555 Contact: Jonathan Pfautz Phone: (617) 491-3474 Web Site: www.cra.com Abstract: Military information systems, including those used in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), aggregate massive amounts of heterogeneous data, but typically provide ineffective visualization tools to explore those datasets in support of high-quality, collaborative decision-making by distributed teams. Linking datasets entails authorship of complex transformation and loading scripts. Existing reporting systems require time-consuming manual coding of arcane templates, yielding rudimentary visualizations with primitive interactivity. Finally, remote collaborators are often relegated to the sidelines, able to collaborate only by making static offline changes to a shared document or report. To address these needs, we propose to design and demonstrate a Business Intelligence Visualization System for Organizational Understanding, Analysis, and Collaboration (BIVOUAC). BIVOUAC seamlessly integrates disparate datasets and presents a taxonomy of rich, detailed, visual metaphors for exploratory decision-making. A multimodal interactive architecture allows users with diverse displays and input devices to directly manipulate visualizations and navigate large datasets, using interactivity controls that extend the conceptual model of the visualization. Teams can collaborate locally or remotely, simultaneously or asynchronously, with visual cues and affordances that reinforce cooperation within a shared workspace. The development of this technology will enable dramatic improvements in decision-making in the Navy's ERP program and for program managers throughout the DoD. Benefits: We see considerable promise in the commercial application of several components of the proposed BIVOUAC system. We expect the full-scope BIVOUAC system, as well as component rendering, multimodal control, and collaboration components, to have immediate and tangible benefit for information understanding and decision making in a number of military systems, including the Navy's recently deployed ERP implementation. We also intend to incorporate visualization techniques developed under BIVOUAC into our commercial DRIVET visualization component. DRIVE is a suite of ontology-based visualization libraries that reduce cost and accelerate the authoring of highly tailorable visualizations for strategic and tactical planning and decision-making, as well as situational awareness at all levels. Return