User Defined Operational Pictures for Tailored Situation Awareness

This paper describes an effort underway to develop operational concepts and technical implementations for user defined operational pictures (UDOP). The purpose of the UDOP capability is to create, visualize, and share decision-focused views of the operational environment for decision-makers to support accurate situation awareness and timely decision-making in a distributed net-centric C2 environment. Net-centric C2 architectures will make available a considerable amount of information that can be injected into an operational picture for situation awareness and decision support; the UDOP capability enables transformation of that universe of data into a decision-focused narrative of the battlespace. Unlike a traditional common operational picture (COP), a UDOP allows the user to select what information should be included in or excluded from the data set defining the operational picture at the source. The core elements of a UDOP capability are data access mechanisms to build a UDOP from the outputs of systems of record using net-centric means; visualization and presentation tools that provide effective situation awareness; business logic for creating added-value information products derived from raw data inputs, and collaboration tools to enable shared situation awareness. This paper provides an overview of a proposed UDOP operational concept, as well as a description of a reference architecture and prototype implementation.