What is a Situational Awareness Message?
Situational Awareness is the ability to find out what is going on around you to help you make critical, time-sensitive decisions. Additionally, situational awareness is not a discrete topic; effective situational awareness is context specific and has the ability to adapt and evolve to make communications more efficient.
At its core, a situational awareness message includes the time, location, type, contextual content, and identification of the author/recipients. These message attributes support the idea that a situational awareness message is temporal and is intended to be consumed within a time and spatial context. The Team Connect platform brokers the distribution of situational awareness messages in a variety of formats and a variety of transport mediums.
Time
The time attribute of a SA message defines when a message was created, published, and how long it is valid for. Once the message “expires” it only exists as an artifact and not as an actionable message.
Location
Location is represented by a latitude and longitude value set by the user (or programmatically with a GPS receiver) and tied to the time the message was authored.
Type
A situational awareness message can exist in several different forms. Some common examples include chat, images and geographic points. New types of messages can be created by developers to further tailor Team Connect for a specific purpose or mission.
Contextual Content
Based on the Type, the contextual content is the payload for a situational awareness message. Content inside of a situational awareness message is always text based and it is up to the client application to determine how to best represent the content (i.e., the content could be a hyperlink to an image). The most common types of contextual content include:
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• Geochat Messages
• Geographic points with associated metadata
• Geographic shapes represented with text
• Hyperlinks to media (images and video)
• Situational Awareness Location Updates
Authors and Recipients
An author is able to send a situational awareness message to one or more recipients connected to the same Team Connect Group or Group that is visible through an active federation. The Team Connect application defines the groups a user belongs to, and when connected to a specific group, the other users they are allowed to interact with. Group federation is an administrative function of the Team Connect application and supports the concept of temporarily bringing disparate users together to exchange situational awareness messages.
Not all types of situational awareness messages need to be communicated to one or more recipients. When working offline, an author should be able to create situational awareness messages that aid in planning activities and can be recalled in real time to help improve a decision making process.
There will be more to follow on this topic. I thought it was important to offer up this basic definition of situational awareness to highlight the fact that SA messages are adaptable and go beyond just simple location and reports. Different industries and organizations have mission critical needs that are answered by effective situational awareness data. What does is SA mean to you?
