By analogy with the resolution for a single random quantity, we define the resolved uncertainty for the belief structure [B] to be
The total resolution is the sum of the resolutions for any collection of
elements of 
with prior variance one, which are a priori
uncorrelated. Note that if D is the empty set 
, then
Where appropriate, we may therefore view as the prior
uncertainty in the collection B, written as
namely the total uncertainty associated with any maximal collection of
uncorrelated elements of standardised to unit variance. We define the
system resolution for B to be the ratio of resolved to prior
uncertainty for the collection, namely
The system resolution provides qualitatively similar information for the
structure 
to that expressed by the resolution for a single quantity,
X. 
can be viewed as the ``average'' of the resolutions for each
canonical direction, so that a value near one implies that we expect
substantial information about most elements of , while a value near zero
indicates that there are a variety of elements for which the adjustment is not
expected to be informative.