Building principles for a quality of information specification for sensor information

Abstract

In the highly heterogeneous environments of coalition operations, sharing sensor-originated information with desired quality characteristics is key to the effective execution of coalition tasks. A characterization of the quality of information (QoI) is useful in many contexts and can be invaluable in making decisions such as trusting, managing, and using information in particular applications. However, the manner of representing the QoI is highly application-dependent. This leads to divergent QoI characterizations and manifestations hampering the effective and streamlined execution of coalition tasks. An application-agnostic QoI specification can provide consistency in the representation of information and its quality, and enable QoI-aware determinations across many different applications. In this paper, an application-agnostic QoI model which can be readily customized to the needs of specific applications is presented. Object-oriented modelling principles are leveraged to attain a QoI model that can be used in many different contexts.