Sketching for military courses of action diagrams

Abstract

A serious barrier to the digitalization of the US military is that commanders find traditional mouse/menu, CAD-style interfaces unnatural. Military commanders develop and communicate battle plans by sketching courses of action (COAs). This paper describes nuSketch Battlespace, the latest version in an evolving line of sketching interfaces that commanders find natural, yet supports significant increased automation.We describe techniques that should be applicable to any specialized sketching domain: glyph bars and compositional symbols to tractably handle the large number of entities that military domains use, specialized glyph types and gestures to keep drawing tractable and natural, qualitative spatial reasoning to provide sketch-based visual reasoning, and comic graphs to describe multiple states and plans. Experiments, both completed and in progress, are described to provide evidence as to the utility of the system.

Let There Be Light! Knowledge-Based 3-D Sketching Design Tools

“…Diagrammatic interaction has been explored in physical domains such as mechanical engineering [9] and geography [10] as well as to support tasks such as interaction design [11] and military action planning [12]. In this vein our earlier work developed a general system for diagrammatic interaction, based on an end-user programmable visual language [13].…”

Aiding knowledge capture by searching for extensions of knowledge models

“…In light of the difficulties in capturing knowledge through traditional knowledge engineering processes, there is considerable interest in facilitating the knowledge capture process, in particular through methods that allow more direct and natural interactions between system and expert (e.g., [13]). The Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) at the University of West Florida has led a multiyear initiative on tools to empower experts to directly construct knowledge models, through the process of concept mapping [24].…”

Reasoning about Hand-Drawn Sketches: An Approach Based on Intelligent Software Agents

“…In fact, this approach allows to save time and paper, to share the diagram with colleagues which are spread all over the world, to teach how a diagram should be correctly drawn, to archive and retrieve it in an electronic form. These advantages are well-known: the literature discusses many examples of software systems able to recognize hand-drawn sketches in very different domains [3,4,5]. However, there are situations where the user's needs go far beyond the use of a software system just for recognizing symbols in the correct way.…”

“…Based on the nuSketch architecture, nusketch Battlespace (nSB), a system specialized for military reasoning, has been created [3]. The system provides a sketching interface for drawing military battle plans, which are understood using qualitative spatial reasoning.…”

“…Recent years' experience suggests that a great improvement to hand-drawn sketch recognizers can be introduced by enhancing their level of "intelligence", i.e., enabling them to show an intelligent behavior to the user and to help him/her to find solutions to a problem [3]. A computer system might help the user by providing both recognition functionalities of hand-drawn symbols and domain specific knowledge for extracting the underlying sketch meaning and for supporting the user to reason about it.…”