Characterization of hard and soft sources of information: A practical illustration

Physical sensors (hard sources) and humans (soft sources) have complementary features in terms of perception, reasoning, memory. It is thus natural to combine their associated information for a wider coverage of the diversity of the available information and thus provide an enhanced situation awareness for the decision maker. While the fusion domain mainly considers (although not only) the processing and combination of information from hard sources, conciliating these two broad areas is gaining more and more interest in the domain of hard and soft fusion. In order to better understand the diversity and specificity of sources of information, we propose a functional model of a source of information, and a structured list of dimensions along which a source of information can be qualified. We illustrate some properties on a real data gathered from an experiment of light detection in a fog chamber involving both automatic and human detectors.