From: gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Gregory B. Newby)
Subject: military information systems
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1991 16:53:02 GMT
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY




It was pointed out to me that in my post a few weeks ago about the
new VR lab at Syracuse U I spoke of "military intelligence."  In 
fact, I should have said, "military information systems."

That corrected, here are a few ramblings on the topic:  What might a
military information system look like in a virtual environment?

What makes a mil. info. sys. different from your standard virtual
reality environment is that all data are not physical.  That is, you
wouldn't just have, say, a map of a theatre of action and locations of
tanks and oil wells and such....  You would also need to represent
non-physical data.

Non-physical data?  I mean things such as text (descriptions,
transactions, communiques), statistical data (weapon status,
temperature, casualties), and other things which don't have a direct
physical manifestation.

It's the non-physical bit that's of interest to me.  The problems of
representing things like trees, tanks, and mountains seem to be fairly
straightforward -- we already know how to do such things in 2D with
maps and so forth, and these are the types of environments already
provided in virtual worlds.  (Not to belittle the rendering, speed, 
and other issues for physical items in a virtual world.)

To represent non-physical data means we have choices:  how to visualize,
where to locate, how to decide which information is relevant....  The
literature on information retrieval doesn't speak to these issues (they
are almost entirely text-based:  something we will probably want to 
minimize in a virtual information system).

In the ideal case, all information in a virtual information system
("VIS," to invent a new term) would be located just where someone
would look for it, and be presented in just the right way so as to 
provide all the information needed, and none of the information not
needed.  Right....  Well, that hasn't happened in years and years of
research on AI and IR (information retrieval).

So, what can we do?  For a small- to medium-sized domain, we can model
the organization and representation of the data by just asking people
to talk about the processes they go through and the situations in
which they need information:  what questions and goals do they have at
each phase?  Then, we have a pretty good basis for organizing and
presenting the data.  This would probably work pretty well for
decision making tasks.

For larger domains (like you find in an online catalog of bibliographic
references, for example), both the problem space (of the user(s)) and
the information space (system domain) becomes too large to map by
asking people.  We need to think here about automatic means of 
representing the data.  

Statistical measures might provide some sort of structure to the items
in the database (I'm currently working on building a multidimensional
space where items which occur together frequently in a database are
located close together in the space -- using keyterms from a
bibliographic database).  

Later, though, we'll need to think about the "dimensions" or qualities
on which people think about information for a particular domain, and
try to create useful ways of presenting information in a virtual
environment.

How is a VIS different from a standard text-based IR system (say, your
friendly neighborhood library card catalog)?  First, you are able to
interact with the data -- to navigate through the system's
'information space.'  Second, you have information about the
relationships among items in the database -- which you generally don't
get much of in your standard IR system.

The key for the VIS is to provide a representation that makes sense for
particular users in particular situations.  Then, we need to get the
physical and non-physical data coordinated for an effective military
information system. 

Comments?  What other virtual worlds might need to incorporate both
physical and non-physical data?

Are any other virtual workers thinking about representation of non-physical
data?  Are my boundaries too narrow?
-- Greg Newby
   School of Information Studies	gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu
   Syracuse University			gbnewby@sunrise.bitnet
		"Curiouser and curiouser" - Alice