Managing Metadata in Collaborative Command and Control Analysis

Abstract

When analyzing field trials to examine command and control, there is a great need for means of presenting, coordinating, exploring and analyzing large amounts of data captured from multiple sources. The products of this analysis include insights, reflections, questions, and hypotheses. From an epistemological point of view, it is crucial to maintain a solid chain of reasoning from the data captured in the field, through the presentation formats used in the analysis process, and to the results of the analysis delivered to the clients. To this end, we present the Metadata Workbench, which manages metadata in command and control analysis. This analysis tool embeds metadata in contextual information, coordinates them in time, and links them to the supporting data. Using the tool, multiple analysts, experts, and researchers can exchange comments on both data and metadata in a collaborative and explorative investigation of a complex scenario. The tool is implemented as a component in the Mind framework and is demonstrated using data from distributed tactical operations.