Beyond Situation Awareness: Considerations for Sense-Making in Complex Intelligence Operations

There has been a great deal of work done in (sensor) data fusion for situation awareness scenarios, in which timelines are short (e.g., seconds, minutes, perhaps hours) and geography is limited (a military installation, a harbor, a coastline). However, there has been comparatively little examination of intelligence fusion models and their informational needs in scenarios which cover much longer timelines (weeks, months, years) and greater geographical areas, of particular interest in today's interconnected world of asymmetric threats such as terrorism, human trafficking, organized crime and other cross-border concerns. Making sense of such complex scenarios requires collecting information and fusion products from a broad range of sources both human and device-derived over time to look for patterns of behavior and to track changing context information. This paper examines some of the challenges of modelling for fusion in complex intelligence operations.