NCOIC Update
Written by Hans Polzer and Dr. Aaron Budgor
MIT 2009 Volume: 13 Issue: 10 (November)
In the areas of net-centric operations and interoperability, NCOIC provides “voice of industry” recommendations about processes and technology to its government customers. NCOIC’s engagement with the U.S. Navy takes the form of addressing customeridentified challenges, and those related to maritime operations in general. This article highlights Navy-NCOIC collaboration and introduces net-centric patterns, both of which may help U.S. and other naval forces improve interoperability.
One example of that collaboration is the consortium’s recent engagement with Naval Air Systems Command’s (NAVAIR) Test and Evaluation (T&E) Directorate.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense Test Resource Management Center (TRMC) recently charged NAVAIR T&E with assessing the potential ability of service-oriented architectures to support distributed testing. After conducting that assessment—but before publishing its report—NAVAIR T&E invited NCOIC’s members to formally review the document’s findings, recommendations and conclusions, and to provide industry’s comments about their completeness and accuracy.
NCOIC completed its review in 10 days, and NAVAIR and TRMC subsequently expressed interest in further collaborations to promote net-centric solutions, such as: recommending and supporting net-centric test and evaluation methodologies, standards, and test architectures to improve NCO; developing T&E tools such as an integrated technical roadmap, conformance tools for net-readiness testing, a lexicon of T&E words and phrases; and promoting and improving the interoperability of test infrastructure components and T&E tools.
A pattern is a set of instructions based on experts’ guidance that, when followed correctly, leads to a predictable and successful outcome. One common example of a pattern is a diagram that illustrates the proper way to connect a television, a DVD player, a stereo and a sound system so that all components can interoperate. Network-centric patterns, when used in conjunction with industry standards, give developers expert advice about how to achieve interoperable systems for the military, emergency responders and air traffic managers—to name a few potential beneficiaries.
SECURE GATEWAYS
NCOIC is developing patterns that address topics such as personnel tracking systems, maritime piracy, secure communications and cloud computing. To date, it has vetted and approved three net-centric patterns, which are free and available at www.ncoic.org.
For example, NCOIC recently approved the Secure Formatted Information Exchange Gateway pattern (SFIEG), which defines a general approach and standards for moving information among networks with different levels of ownership sensitivity. When the Navy engages in coalition operations such as anti-piracy campaigns, the various military and civilian participants may be hampered in exchanging information because of security, privacy or regulatory barriers.
SFIEG is a general solution pattern that addresses this impediment. SFIEG would allow the Navy, its allies and partners to implement an information-sharing mechanism to support data movement between systems and organizations that have different information sensitivity levels and concerns. Although similar gateway systems exist, their use is restricted by export controls. NCOIC’s SFIEG pattern is general enough that the Navy, its allies, commercial entities and non-governmental organizations can use it. The resulting improvement in information sharing would expand the Navy’s ability to interoperate in disaster relief, anti-piracy, anti-smuggling and coalition contexts. SFIEG could also support civil scenarios, such as transmitting patients’ medical records.
With a further 19 patterns in process, NCOIC has begun to coalesce patterns that support its Maritime Domain Awareness, Command, Control and Communications (C3) and Net-Enabled Emergency Communications integrated project teams (IPT). The consortium recognizes that an integrated situation awareness pattern, for example, derived from its C3 IPT might contain functionalities that naval, emergency management or logistics organizations require as each of these domains attempts to understand how their own patterns, standards and scenarios support use cases in other domains. Applicable situation awareness patterns include:
• Data mining or information retrieval based on context-based tailoring of information collection, analysis, and fusion;
• Definition of policies that provide time-dependent services between user communities that are sometimes reluctant to share information; and
• Aligning differences in language and intent between user communities by implementing unambiguous identification, authorization and identification mechanisms.
Hence, generalizing these patterns so that they have reusable applicability to more than one domain makes them much more attractive. NCOIC’s next step is to develop a grid that illustrates a pattern’s utility to multiple user groups with shared problems. ♦
Hans Polzer is chairman of NCOIC’s Net-centric Attributes team and a Lockheed Martin fellow. Dr. Aaron Budgor is senior technical adviser to NCOIC.
