ABSTRACT
The concept of network-centric operations is a process that the military is just beginning to struggle with. Concepts such as situation awareness, information fusion, data mining, collaborative agents, domain actors, and fully integrated sensors have permeated the research and the Department of Defense literature.1-4 Much of this work1-3 focuses on structural and architectural aspects of network-centric operations such as metadata
processes, publishing and subscribing components, or network agents.* For instance, the concept of domain actors or specialized expert agents provides a view of semiautomated networks that balance human-computer interaction. From the fusion side of things, the well-known “levels of fusion” that had its genesis from the Joint Director of Laboratories (JDL†)5-7 provides a foundation for processing multiple sensing sources and inferencing conditions (Figure 17.1).
