ViSAw: Visualizing threat and impact assessment for enhanced situation awareness

Situation awareness relies on a combined knowledge of the environment, friendly actions and adversaries' actions. Impact assessment applies that knowledge to estimate the consequences of those actions and anticipate plausible futures. In domains such as asymmetric warfare and cyber security, timely and comprehensive impact assessment is critical for human analysts to develop situation awareness and thus make informed decisions. This work investigates critical visual elements that will enhance situation awareness and how to display these elements. Our approach leverages results of threat and impact assessment of ongoing situations. These include changes in effects of activities on assets and mission, and the projection of current situations into the future. While other visualization tools have focused on representing asset and event data in a meaningful way, this visualization attempts to display impact and threat to assets and missions.