From Ill-defined Problems to Informed Decisions

Abstract

Decision makers such as military leaders and security analysts are increasingly being asked to make decisions on ill-defined problems. These problems may contain uncertain or incomplete data, and are often complex to piece together. Consequently, decision makers rely heavily on intuition, knowledge and experience. We argue for rich narratives that encapsulate both explicit data and implicit knowledge, supported by three levels of provenance: data, analytical and reasoning. Our hypotheses is that visual analytics tools and methods can help to provide a valuable means to make sense of these complex data, and to help make this tacit knowledge explicit, to support the construction and presentation of the decision.