Network Situational Awareness: Sonification & Visualization in the Cyber Battlespace

This chapter treats computer networks as a cyber warfighting domain in which the maintenance of situational awareness is impaired by increasing traffic volumes and the lack of immediate sensory perception. Sonification (the use of non-speech audio for communicating information) is proposed as a viable means of monitoring a network in real time and a research agenda employing the sonification of a network’s self organized criticality within a context-aware affective computing scenario is given. The chapter views a computer network as a cyber battlespace with a particular operations spectrum and dynamics. Increasing network traffic volumes are interfering with the ability to present real-time intelligence about a network and so suggestions are made for how the context of a network might be used to help construct intelligent information infrastructures. Such a system would use affective computing principles to sonify emergent properties (such as self-organized criticality) of network traffic and behaviour to provide effective real-time situational awareness

The WWW Prototype of the Alexandria Digital Library

The Alexandria Digital Library (ADL) is focussed on providing broad access to distributed collections of spatially-indexed information. ADL has a four-component architecture involving collections, catalog, interfaces, and ingest facilities. The first stage in the construction of ADL resulted in the design and implementation of a rapid prototype (RP) system. The second stage, which is described in this paper, involves an expansion of the functionality of the RP and its extension to the World-Wide-Web (WWW). We describe issues arising in each of the components of the architecture in extending the library to WWW as well as our current resolution of these issues. We also discuss an extension of the class of supportable queries to include simple, contentbased queries involving geographic "features" and image textures. The metadata of ADL has been extended to include gazetteer information supporting the first class of extended queries. We discuss image processing and parallel computing sup..