Designing a Pragmatic Graphical Grammar

Modern adversaries have become more proficient in conducting cyber-attacks against our military's command and control (C2) infrastructure. To maintain security against these threats, operators perform a range of high-fidelity security assessments of existing and evolving software systems. This is just one example of the many settings in which massive amounts of data-Big Data-can prove difficult to understand in a timely manner for taking actions and responding to threats. To support such real-time analysis, situation awareness tools must reduce the cognitive load of monitoring multiple large, simultaneous data streams. This paper seeks to provide a Pragmatic Graphical Grammar (PGG) that evolves the concept of graphical grammars into an observability-focused method of data presentation.