Information quality in information fusion and decision making with applications to crisis management

Designing fusion systems for decision support in complex dynamic situations such as crises requires fusion of a large amount of multimedia and multispectral information coming from geographically distributed sources to produce estimates about objects and gain knowledge of the entire domain of interest. Information to be fused and made sense of includes but is not limited to data obtained from physical sensors, surveillance reports, human intelligence reports, operational information, and information obtained from social medial, opportunistic sensors and traditional open sources (internet, radio, TV, etc.). Successful processing of this information may also demand information sharing and dissemination, and action cooperation of multiple stakeholders. Decision making in such environment calls for designing a fusion-based human–machine system characterizing constant information exchange between all nodes of the processing. The quality of decision making strongly depends on the success of being aware of, and compensating for, insufficient information quality at each step of information exchange. Designing the methods of representing and incorporating information quality into such processing is a relatively new and a rather difficult problem. The chapter discusses major challenges and suggests some approaches to address this problem.