Dynamic Reference Information: Formalising Contextual Actionable Information for Contested Environments

Abstract

Acquiring situation awareness and understanding within contested and dynamic environments requires the most up-to-date information that is both actionable and contextual. Information fusion systems currently use static a-priori information and knowledge bases, and in some cases, incomplete or stale symbolic information, which is not situational or contextual. This paper formalises Dynamic Reference Information (DRI), which is defined as temporal, contextual, situational and actionable information that can update a-priori information. Furthermore, DRI semantically represents new objects, attributes and their values from situations within an observable space. The formalisation of DRI was used on unstructured information generated during the Heimdall Experiment. During the analysis, two main results were reported: i) novel Objects of Interest within an Observable Space were able to be defined from unstructured information ii) the implicit nature of context in DRI allowed an enhanced situational understanding of all a-priori and novel objects perceived in a situation represented within a tactical display.