On 25 – 27 March 2019 CMRE hosted the NATO SAS-139 Research Task Group on NATO Analytical War Gaming - Innovative Approaches for Data Capture, Analysis and Exploitation, and the NATO IST-141 on Exploratory Visual Analytics for a joint meeting.

The aim of the NATO SAS-139 is to improve NATO's analytical wargaming capability by providing guidelines for ensuring analytical rigour and meaningful data capture in  wargames. 

The NATO IST-141 aims at researching, developing, and applying exploratory visual analytics with the following objectives: to exploit and make sense of large and complex data, i.e. Big data;  to help make tacit knowledge explicit; to provide acute situation awareness and to support the construction and communication of informed decisions in cyber, maritime, and social media domains as well as the use of batch simulation. 

The objective of the joint meeting was to discuss how to empower wargaming practices with innovative visualisations and visual analytics. The participants emphasized the importance of the continuous development of tools to improve perception, comprehension, and communication of relevant information before, during and after wargame execution. The two Task Groups also recognised interactive visualisations and visual analytics as powerful approaches for extracting knowledge from data and to support analytical wargames. The recognition of cross-link activities between the two groups will result in further initiatives to explore potential collaboration.