Coalition C3 Information Exchange Using Binary Symbolic Vectors

Abstract

Communicating information between entities requires there to be a common understanding of the language and the concepts being exchanged. Where information has to be rapidly conveyed, or where the communications are limited, the use of specialized language or symbols is often used but this requires the various parties to know the precise meaning of the terminology (i.e. the parties can correctly interpret the language or symbols used). In this paper we propose a new potential approach for information exchange that makes use of binary symbolic vectors to semantically represent the information to be exchanged. We show how such vector representations can be used to semantically convey large amounts information between coalition partners in a compact representation that can be interpreted at different levels of semantic abstraction. In this paper we illustrate the concept by showing how a complex text (in this case Shakespeare's play Hamlet) can be represented using symbolic vectors. We discuss how such representations can be efficiently communicated between coalition partners and how this can significantly reduce the communications requirements. We develop the concept to illustrate how symbolic vectors could be used to perform command and control functions in distributed decentralized coalition operations.