Activity Representation and Management for Crisis Action Planning

This work presents the development of a multiuser virtual environment in support of crisis management planning activities. Coupling ongoing work in activity representation with analysis of the crisis action planning domain, an extensible domain ontology was developed. Studying the domain, several challenges became apparent: (1) the need to support extensive dynamic and distributed collaboration, (2) the need for a flexible, open architecture, (3) the need for views of the information tailored to the activities of the planning team, and (4) the opportunity to leverage past and current related efforts in the domain. This project developed a Java-based collaboration architecture around a multi-user domain (MUD) to provide presence and access to collaborative services. The collaborative infrastructure layer provides persistence, user authentication, and access control Built upon this substrate are collaborative services such as a whiteboard mechanism, chat functions, and the domain-specific Mission Analysis Support Tool (MAST). The target use of MAST is to represent and track workflow in the crisis action planning done by the Operations Planning Team of the U.S. Pacific Command. The design approach was to base MAST on a reusable class library which implements a rich ontology structure and represents key elements of the domain. Our ontology draws on the SPOT project (Jacobs, et. al. 1997) and the Shared Planning and Activity Representation (SPAR) project. The resulting ontology, implemented in Java, is compliant with the SPAR Reference Object Model Specification. A strength of this work in the extensibility, flexibility and openness both of the representation and the system architecture.