C-SLANT: an asynchronous communications tool to support distributed work in the National Airspace System

In recent years there have been a number of efforts under the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) program that have demonstrated the benefits of disseminating both knowledge and goals between organizations in the National Airspace System (NAS), and of collaboratively building decision support tools to assist in the interpretation of the large interrelated dataset produced. The paper describes the development of the Collaborative SLide ANnotation Tool (C-SLANT), an asynchronous communications tool that was developed to support discussion of data from the CDM product Post Operations Evaluation Tool. It is suggested that slide show based, multi-modal, asynchronous, messaging systems appear potentially valuable in this distributed work domain for problem solving during post operations analysis.