Lifting elephants: from data to model

Lifting elephants is a daunting proposition, requiring a wide variety of tools and groups working collaboratively. Supporting situation awareness and policy making using remotely sensed data is a matter of lifting elephants. No one tool is the answer, no one group has all the capability. The vision for this special issue was to demonstrate the potential power of a multi-disciplinary scaffold for lifting the information elephant. Policy makers and military personnel often have a need to rapidly assess novel and extreme environments, for which little information may be known a priori. Historical approaches have focused on in-depth assessment using detailed ethnographic and anthropological procedures over the course of decades. However, from a global decision making perspective such detailed assessment over the course of multiple years is simply too long of a process. What is needed are techniques to provide detailed assessment but in less time, a matter of a few weeks, or better a few data. Such assessments need to be cultural sensitive and support decision making through both improved understanding of the current situation and the ability to reason about the impact of various interventions and courses of action through simulation.