ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the complexity and coupling between behavior and infrastructure during an epidemic and explains that the policy making is abstracted as a cognitive problem. It explains how people construct the synthetic information environment, and how they have been used for policy making during epidemics and other situations. The Synthetic Information Environment (SIE) is a collection of software systems, data sets, and protocols that provides policy informatics with: Adaptability; Extensibility; Scalability; and Flexibility. The chapter explains a synthetic information-based approach for policy making and analysis as it pertains to public health and military preparedness, and supports public and defence policies as they pertain to large-scale crises and embodied in the Comprehensive National Incident Management System (CNIMS). It also explains the need for developing pervasive synthetic information architectures and provides a natural way to understand distributed decision and policy making.
