Decision-centered visualization: time-critical situation awareness and decision-making

摘要

In time-critical domains, such as emergency management or military command and control, users are required to make decisions in highly stressful situations. Decision-Centered Visualization (DCV) is an adaptive, interactive visualization system under development at Fraunhofer CRCG that merges knowledge engineering and visualization technology. Decision and task models, along with knowledge of the information environment of the application domain, are all tightly coupled with the human-machine interface and the visualization architecture in order to produce timely, knowledge-based presentations. Our long-term objective is to provide automated, knowledge-based visualization components that enable decision-makers to quickly achieve situation awareness during their tasks and to make informed decisions under time pressure. DCV embodies a distinct and unique view - DCV is not intended to replace human decision makers, to diagnose or plan, or the provide expert advice to human problem solvers. Instead, DCV is focused on real-time, context-sensitive interactive visualization. As a visualization system, DCV uses domain, task and decision knowledge to assure that decision-makers are presented with the right information at the right time. DCV embodies the argument that this can only be done by merging knowledge technologies with interactive visualization.