Information Evaluation: Discussion about STANAG 2022 Recommendations

An important step in the intelligence gathering process is the fusion of information provided by several sources. The objective of this process is to build an up-to-date and correct view of the current situation with the overall available information in order to make adequate decisions. Moreover, to succeed in this process, it is important to associate with each available information, some attributes like the number of the sources that support it, their reliability, the degree of truth of the information etc. For the moment, these attributes are managed by the human operator when he fuses information provided by the different sources. However, there is no real methodology to do this in a formal manner. And, when relaying this fusion process to a machine, we need to develop formal definitions and algorithms to manage these attributes in addition to fusing information. Furthermore, in a context of interoperability where different systems exchange information, common definitions of these attributes have to be shared. The Standardization Agreements (STANAG) 2022 of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) defines a framework for such common definitions.