Tools for enhancing distributed, asynchronous collaboration in army operations

Advances in digital communication technologies have had widespread benefits for distributed and asynchronous collaboration. It is only natural, then, to apply these technologies to digitize the battlefield. In fact, some tools have been implemented in the field and found successful in providing useful information to commanders and warfighters. This information is provided through a variety of media, including machine- and human-generated text, images, video, and files that combine different media (such as briefings that contain text and graphics). However, few efforts aim to provide human-generated, multimedia content in machine-generated text environments that are currently under development. This paper describes an effort to use semantic representations of battlefield data to provide commanders information that is relevant to their needs. Additionally, the tools developed make it possible to easily augment machine-generated planning alerts with human-generated content.