Assessing the Usefulness of Information in the Context of Coalition Operations

This chapter presents the results of a study aiming at restricting the flow of information exchanged between various agents in a coalition. More precisely, when an agent expresses a need of information, we suggest sending only the information that is the most useful for this particular agent to act. This requires the characterization of “the most useful information.” The model described in this chapter defines a degree of usefulness of a piece of information as an aggregation of several usefulness degrees, each of them representing a particular point of view of what useful information might be. Specifically, the degree of usefulness of a piece of information is a multifaceted notion which takes into account the fact that it represents potential interest for the user with respect to his request, has the required security clearance level, can be accessed in time and understood by the user, and can be trusted by the user at a given level.