Description of Defense Track
A
new approach to managing the development and operation of data services for the
warrior has recently emerged within the Department of Defense (DoD). This new
approach is being enabled and driven by the advent of extensive network
connectivity, something Defense planners now describe as the Global Information
Grid (GIG). Like the Internet, the GIG
is not being (indeed cannot be) designed and implemented as a block. Rather, the GIG is evolving through the
loosely coupled actions of many players to become a vast geographically
distributed electronic market, a place composed of numerous, various and highly
dynamic information resources, a place where information supply and demand
changes continually, a place where the physical means, configuration and
capacity of data interchange may shift with startling rapidity. The GIG, in essence, includes any
network that a warrior might connect to – the Internet plus a number of
intranets (some of which are highly classified). The GIG will rely on Web Services and XML, in
particular, to provide key data visibility, data exchange, and data access
functionality.
Over the past three years, the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has moved aggressively to develop a practical management strategy and infrastructure for harnessing the potential and minimizing risk of this technology. In so doing, a “way ahead” for market-driven data management has come into focus, broadly applicable to pressing DoD information system challenges. DISA is, in essence, “piloting” a robust market-oriented Publish and Subscribe technical architecture and corresponding business processes through its XML Registration initiative. DISA calls this new approach to managing and organizing metadata: “A Market Driven Strategy.”
In DISA’s new approach, there are Build-Time and Run-Time
markets, the former being composed of developers while the latter consists of
warriors and warrior support personnel.
Both markets are centered around “communities
of interest” that are forming naturally as developers coordinate “up front” to
engineer capabilities for high volume network interactions and warrior-users
then exploit those capabilities to discover and exchange data.
The
key to interoperability between the myriads of systems supporting DoD is the visibility of the semantics and structure of the
data in use – metadata. The widespread
and growing awareness of metadata as a means to efficiently identify and locate
resources is driving the need to invest in an infrastructure that can deliver
these services. Metadata registries are
emerging as essential enablers to DoD operations –
both for the warfighter and the sustaining base. However, the metadata can not be allowed to
become a relic sitting on a shelf, it must become an active component in
information retrieval.
This
track will begin with an exploration of the DoD
Strategy. This strategy, piloted in the
DoD XML Registry, is now spreading to the other galleries within the DoD Data
Emporium. The new DoD
strategy also is seeking to incorporate the many existing data registries –
these will be discussed during this track.
Metadata registries serve both the application design (buildtime) and application execution (runtime) customer
bases. Support for the discovery of and
access to information resources requires that registry deployment must support
production systems. A wide variety of
registries will be deployed within the DoD networks
that will need to communicate (federate) with registries managed by other
agencies. Several federal agencies have
now begun to explore the technical and programmatic challenges to successful
federation. The sessions in this track
will address each of these aspects as they relate to metadata registration to
support horizontal fusion. Our final
session will address the DoD perspective on the
results of the Open Forum.