Charles River Analytics, Inc. received a follow on contract from the Air Force Research Lab to developing the Toolkit for Role-aware Exchange of Knowledge (TREK). TREK is a Java toolkit that provides an information management system as well as a real-time role assignment component. It addresses concerns that existing collaborative software systems do not by supporting the development of collaborative, real-time, role-based information sharing systems. TREK’s novel approach is centered around using explicitly-defined roles and user models to craft information distribution and presentation, as well as allowing for the reallocation of roles in a dynamic fashion.
“TREK is a toolkit for building systems to manage and construct knowledge-centric, dynamic teams across a networked environment,” explained Alex Feinman, Associate Senior Scientist at Charles River Analytics. “TREK-based systems integrate models of roles and information needs within a task and use these to assist in rapid team creation, task status monitoring, and role-oriented information delivery.”
Feinman continued, “TREK models are stored as formalized concept maps, a compromise between the human-readability of concept maps and the need for a representation amenable to computational parsing. This decreases effort for system designers to customize TREK-based systems to a specific domain, as subject matter experts can incorporate their knowledge directly into the TREK system in a straightforward and intuitive fashion.”
Charles River Analytics brings valuable experience to the development of TREK, including expertise in workflow analysis and design. The company has several years of experience in cognitive analysis, human factors, information presentation for action and decision support, and development of distributed systems.
