The military is formulating new visions, strategies, and concepts that capitalize on emerging information-age technologies to provide its warfighters with significantly improved capabilities to meet the national security challenges of the 21st century. New, networked command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C⁴ISR capabilities promise information superiority and decision dominance that will enhance the quality and speed of command anenable revolutionary warfighting concepts. Assessing the contribution of C⁴ISR toward achieving a network-centric warfare (NCW) capability is a major challenge for the Department of Defense (DoD) because of the multiplicity of interacting factors and the lack of understanding of the...

This chapter outlines the analytic framework we adopted to assess the effects of information quality and team collaboration on shared situational awareness and, eventually, decision and execution. We begin by describing the underlying construct that describes the C4ISR process we model here: the C4ISR Information Superiority Reference Model. The quality of the information flowing through what we call “the information value chain” is transformed to produce an overall assessment of the quality of the CROP generated. This, in turn, affects individual situational awareness and, subsequently, shared situational awareness through the process of team collaboration.

The C⁴ISR Information Superiority Reference Model...

The physical and information domains are the sources of information used to inform decisions in the cognitive domain. We discuss them together in this chapter because of their close connection: The ground truth resident in the physical domain is approximated through data collection and processing in the information domain. The observed CROP is the approximation of the relevant portions of ground truth disseminated to friendly users.

The physical domain is the beginning and the end of the C⁴ISR cycle—both the subject of and object of decision. Chapter Two described this domain as consisting of the disposition of friendly and...

In the information domain, the data collected on the physical domain are processed and disseminated to friendly users. The product produced is the observed CROP, consisting of a function of the set of feature vectors, F₀, F₁, F₂, and F₃. The quality of the information used to produce the picture depends on the functional architecture in each of the information subdomains. In the cognitive domain, the products of the information domain are used to take decisions. The mental processes that transform the CROP into a decision and a subsequent action are not well understood, beyond the fact that they follow...

The preceding chapters described a mathematical framework that might be used to develop detailed mathematical quantities that represent what are generally considered to be qualitative concepts. In some cases, data may exist in the military C₄ISR community to confirm or disconfirm both the process and the examples presented in Appendix B. In these cases, it will be necessary to locate and assess the data. Where data do not exist, further experimentation or historical analysis will be necessary.

As noted earlier, the discussion of the cognitive domain is not complete. The relationship between information quality and situational awareness is the first...