Concern level assessment: building domain knowledge into a visual system to support network-security situation awareness

Information officers and network administrators require tools to help them achieve situation awareness about potential network threats. We describe a response to mini-challenge 1 of the 2012 IEEE VAST challenge in which we developed a visual analytic solution to a network security situation awareness problem. To support conceptual design, we conducted a series of knowledge elicitation sessions with domain experts. These provided an understanding of the information they needed to make situation awareness judgements as well as a characterisation of those judgements in the form of production rules which define a parameter we called the ‘Concern Level Assessment’ (CLA). The CLA was used to provide heuristic guidance within a visual analytic system called MSIEVE. An analysis of VAST challenge assessment sessions using M-SIEVE provides some evidence that intelligent heuristics like this can provide useful guidance without unduly dominating interaction and understanding.

Neesha Kodagoda, Simon Attfield, Tinni Choudhury, Chris Rooney, Glenford Mapp, Phong H Nguyen, Louis Slabbert, B L William Wong, Mahdi Aiash, Yongjun Zheng, Kai Xu, and Aboubaker Lasebae, Concern level assessment: Building domain knowledge into a visual system to support network-security situation awareness, Information Visualization, Vol 13, Issue 4, pp. 346 - 360.Copyright © 2013 The Author(s). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

Published online before print June 27, 2013