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The Environmental Visualization (EVIS) project is a collaborative effort between the Naval Research Laboratory and APL-UW. EVIS provides a web "workshop" where users can access high-resolution meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) information from a remote server. They create products for their missions, publish their products to a secure network, and accomplish this roughly 40 percent faster than with previous tools. Efficiency is maximized when users can access other forecasters' products on the network.
EVIS has fully transitioned from the laboratory to the Fleet and is being implemented for defense operations worldwide by the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey, California.
APL-UW focused on designing the user interface. Developers first had to understand the job of tactical forecasting and the role of the human in the decision-making process. During training exercises, forecaster and technicians were videotaped and observed real-time working on hypothetical forecast products. The experiments showed that EVIS could reduce the time spent making forecast products by half, and with almost no training.
EVIS provides portal and other Java-based access mechanisms to METOC data sources through a family of value-added web services that were developed to expose and process data for METOC impacts related to specific military mission parameters.
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- EVIS is part of APL-UW's cognitive engineering research, which spans a wide variety of projects from interface redesigns to prototype systems to systems that are in daily use. More >>
- Press release issued by the Naval Research Laboratory
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Based on a pre-set matrix of mission effect rules that can be modified by the user, the EVIS Mission Effects Services (EMES) generates mission impact summaries and related map images that are available and advertised throughout the networked enterprise.
The web portal environment allows the necessary design functionality to meet multiple users' needs, but the interface needs to communicate a workflow with information tiered in a way that aids decision making for users at different echelons. The system includes the ability for the user to create rules that combine data sources and create composite displays, or provide warnings when tactical thresholds are reached. Displays may range from the type of stoplight graphics that are used extensively in commanders' briefings to sophisticated probabilistic forecast information.
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