Work analysis for contextual awareness support of navy sensor operators

Advancements made by the Canadian Forces in the information technology used to support decision making incommand and control environments, while significant, still do not adequately support the work of sensoroperators (Renaud & Isenor, 2010) (Knight, 2002). Naval sensor operators still require additional operationalinformation to establish the contextual relevance of the data received from their sensors and its operationalapplication. The operational information they have is poorly organized and presented as it comes from a varietyof different sources and is organized based on the data providers' requirements (Renaud & Isenor, 2010) andnot the operators' needs. The operator is left with the challenge of searching the information space to find,evaluate, summarise, analyze, and integrate this information into a representation of the current operationalenvironment. MDA is interested in how to effectively integrate the contextual operational information intoshipboard combat management systems to improve the use of the sensed data and use of the sensors. DalhousieUniversity will collaborate with MDA to perform a literature study of Context and Cognitive DomainAwareness studies across a range of users of relevant complex systems. Preliminary work domain analysis willbe conducted to model of the work being done, information requirements, and possible informationrepresentations with supporting scenarios.