Integrating Human Terrain Reasoning and Tooling in C2 Systems

Within an operational staff the ‘core business ’ of the Intelligence Cell is to initiate, collect, process, analyze and disseminate relevant information. This Intelligence Preparation of the Environment addresses the environmental evaluation, threat evaluation and results in an integrated overview of the relevant actors and factors. If done correctly the acquired information will greatly improve the Situational Awareness of (sub) commanders and staff members. Traditionally, the environmental evaluation mainly addressed the physical aspects of the terrain (Physical Terrain information). However, in present day much more information is crucial for obtaining success. Examples of this new type of information are: sense of security, economic prosperity, political or cultural differences etc. This so-called ‘Human Terrain ’ (HT) information could greatly enhance the ability to better understand the situation in a particular area or region. Although this new focus has now been integrated in doctrine, its implementation remains challenging not only because of the lack of knowledge about which type of information is relevant and what its relative importance is but also because current C2 systems generally don’t support the visualization of Human Terrain information. To address the ‘gap ’ between presenting only factual information and also presenting its implications for the mission, we propose an approach that uses expert rules to derive implication information from facts. For the access, generation and visualization of HT information we propose an architecture for the integration with C2. The architecture is inspired by the approach used in the US Battlefield Terrain Reasoning and Awareness program where military relevant aspects of the physical terrain are (in an automated way) derived from physical terrain data. 1.