default Critical review of uncertainty communication standards in support of maritime situation awareness

Critical review of uncertainty communication standards in support of Maritime Situation Awareness. de Rosa, Francesca; Jousselme, Anne-Laure. CMRE-FR-2018-010. August 2019.

Maritime Situational Awareness is strongly supported by the development of systems able to correctly integrate and correlate data and information deriving from heterogeneous sources, which might differ in nature (e.g. hard sources and soft sources) and more generally in quality. A coherent and unified characterisation of information quality and uncertainty within and across systems is critical with respect to decision making. This is even more important in a coalition context, where different nations exchange information from possibly different domains, military or civilian. This report summarises the results of a survey and qualitative analysis, conducted on 22 standards and documents related to uncertainty communication. The work allowed to identify some of the underpinning factors to the concepts of source reliability, information credibility, confidence, likelihood and probability. Moreover, it highlighted how those documents present sometimes vague, non-clear or even inconsistent definitions of those concepts and their rating across different domains or nations. Although research is still needed to ensure an harmonised approach to the definition of uncertainty related concepts, this work portrayed the current status of standard communication of uncertainty. Outcomes of this study would be useful to the definition of future standards of uncertainty communication and data sharing protocols and may impact the design of underlying reasoning schemes in data fusion systems.