Managing massive datasets from distributed tactical operations

Reconstruction and exploration is the foundation of analyzing the complex course of events of distributed tactical operations. As the instruments collecting data from operations become more frequent and more capable of recording multimedia data, the datasets needed to store each operation grow rapidly. This thesis presents tools to manage these large amounts of multimedia data from distributed tactical operations, including modeling the hierarchal structure of the actors in an operation, data collection and exporting collected data to the operation visualization framework MIND, developed at the Swedish Defense Research Agency. This thesis explores two main areas of data management: modeling and accessibility. First, we present a general data model dividing the storage need of a distributed tactical operation into logical blocks. Second, we provide a general object-oriented application programming interface for access to the database. Using these two products we also demonstrate how to build applications for building conceptual models, collecting data and exploring missions.