Craig Bonaceto

Exploring schema similarity at multiple resolutions

Large, dynamic, and ad-hoc organizations must frequently initiate data integration and sharing efforts with insufficient awareness of how organizational data sources are related. Decision makers need to reason about data model interactions much as they do about data instance interactions in OLAP: at multiple levels of granularity. We demonstrate an integrated environment for exploring schema similarity across multiple resolutions. Users visualize and interact with clusters of related schemas using a tool named Affinity. Within any cluster, users may drill-down to examine the extent and content of schema overlap. Further drill down enables users to explore fine-grained element-level correspondences between between two selected schemas.

A Roadmap for Cognitive Engineering in Systems Engineering

We are concerned with three challenges in the design of military Command and Control (C2) systems, namely: the demand for “smaller” organizations, the demand for “better” coordination (human-system, human-human and system-system) and the demand for “faster” execution. Driven by these demands, we performed a survey of Cognitive Engineering techniques with an eye towards how they can improve Systems Engineering efforts. This paper outlines our three challenges (smaller, better, faster) and reviews three successful applications by other Cognitive/Systems engineers faced with similar challenges. The applications employ Computational Cognitive Modeling (to address a demand for smaller), Cognitive Work Analysis (to address a demand for better) and Goal-Directed Task Analysis (to address a demand for faster). These three successes provide a practical roadmap for using Cognitive Engineering methods to address Systems Engineering problems in C2 as well as other domains.