Presented at the 2017 IEEE Conference on Cognitive and Computational Aspects of Situation Management (CogSIMA), Savannah, GA (March 2017)

Modern adversaries have become more proficient in conducting cyberattacks against our military’s command and control (C2) infrastructure. To maintain security against these threats, operators perform a range of high-fidelity security assessments of existing and evolving software systems. This is just one example of the many settings in which massive amounts of data—Big Data—can prove difficult to understand in a timely manner for taking actions and responding to threats. To support such real-time analysis, situation awareness tools must reduce the cognitive load of monitoring multiple large, simultaneous data streams. This paper seeks to provide a Pragmatic Graphical Grammar (PGG) that evolves the concept of graphical grammars into an observability-focused method of data presentation.