Interoperability Viewed As an Incurable Disease

Learning to Cope via

Open Net-Centric Interoperability Standards for Training & Testing

(ONISTT)

Research Project Sponsored by ODUSD/R

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Overview

• The Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Readiness (ODUSD/R) establishes policy and provides oversight for military training

• ODUSD/R has been sponsoring investigation of an overarching policy framework that would ensure interoperability among training support capabilities that are being acquired by the individual Services

• That effort has morphed into: Open Net-Centric Interoperability Standards for Training & Testing (ONISTT)

• This briefing provides a quick snapshot of ONISTT

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The Need

• Capability to conduct Joint/Coalition Training Events: (a) Without requiring all trainees to travel to a common

site, use a common training capability and

(b) Using resources* that are both available and capable of providing a good-enough environment to satisfy the training objectives

* These resources are generally characterized as being either Live (L), Virtual (V), or Constructive (C)

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The Constraints

• Training support resources are acquired by individual Services to meet their Title 10 responsibilities

• The capabilities needed to execute Joint training events are not available from any single resource Need multiple resources to work together in synergy* to

collectively supply the needed capabilities• The resources available are not specifically

designed to work together

* Multiple resources working together in synergy = definition of interoperability

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Therefore…

Need for a quick way to create a temporary lash-up of available LVC resources that (collectively) provide a specific set of capabilities

• “Quick” hours, days, weeks – but not years• Traditional labor-intensive “BOGSAT” approach not

acceptable• The list of available resources changes from day-to-day

and event-to-event• The resources were not specifically designed to work

together• The resources do not conform to a single set of common

technical standards• And, realistically, never will -- since they are not “owned” by

any single organization

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A Long Name for this Problem

•Automated composition of improvisational machine-to-machine (m2m) interoperability

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Categorizing Interoperability

Ex: Presentation by Andreas Tolk (VMASC/ODU)

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Data exchanged across engineered, well-defined

interfaces

DoD Discovery

Catalog

DoD Metadata Registry

DoD Service Registry

Other Discovery Catalogs

Data ProducerData Consumer

Shared Space

Unanticipated User of System A Data

Query Catalog(s) System X

“Pull” Structural Metadata

“Pull” Data

Register Structural Metadata

Post/Expose

Data

Pro

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isc

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ery

Me

tad

ata

System B

Known User of System A Data

NCDS: Enabling Unanticipated Users

System A

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DoD Discovery

Catalog

DoD Metadata Registry

DoD Service Registry

Other Discovery Catalogs

Data ProducerData Consumer

Unanticipated member of an A-B-X

confederation

Register Structural

Metadata

Pro

vid

e D

isc

ov

ery

Me

tad

ata

System B

Known User of System A Data

System A

ONISTT Objective: Unanticipated Confederations of Systems

System X

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Key Question

•What collection of standards can be imposed on System X to ensure it will be able to interact with A & B to supply needed capabilities that are missing from the confederation?

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If this problem was a disease, is there a “cure”?

•Short answer: No – it is fundamentally incurable

There’s no such thing as a universal “Swiss Army resource”

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This is a real product from Wenger SA (manufacturers of the Swiss Army knife)Has 85 tools and weighs 2 poundsSuggested retail price = $1,200

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Is there a “cure” for this disease?

•Longer answer: Some incurable diseases are not altogether hopeless – there are possible palliative measures that can help the patient cope with the malady and (within limits) enjoy a reasonable quality of life

•The ONISTT project is focused on developing such palliative measures

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ONISTT -- What it Is

•ONISTT is:• A framework, vocabulary, and formal language for

describing precise objective details about:

• “Demand” – activities required to support training & testing events, including the capabilities needed from LVC resources to support necessary interactions among them

• “Supply” – The capabilities of available from specific LVC resources

• An automated interoperability assessment tool that determines if the supply can satisfy the demand

• A means of capturing and preserving knowledge from SMEs about supply and demand in this domain

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ONISTT -- what is it based on?

•ONISTT builds upon foundational NCO tenets from:

• Net-Centric Data Strategy (NCDS)

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

•ONISTT extends those tenets with technology derived from the Semantic Web initiative

• Ontologies, OWL (the Web Ontology Language), Knowledge Base (KB) structures, and automated reasoning environments

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ONISTT -- what’s the trick?

•Recognizing that it is impossible to assess the viability of a candidate lash-up (“confederation”) based only on the properties of the resources

•Viability of a candidate confederation also depends on:

• The intended purpose (for forming that confederation)

and • Precisely what capabilities each resource is

expected to (a) supply-to and (b) extract-from the confederation

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ONISTT -- What it Is Not

•ONISTT is not:• Yet another “interoperability architecture”• A replacement for any existing interoperability enabler

(e.g., TENA, HLA, DIS)• A replacement for a human event planner• A silver bullet that makes any resource interoperable with

any other resource for any possible purpose

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Lessons Learned from FY-07 Demo

•Automating LVC composition requires assessing the viability of a candidate confederation of resources•The LVC Confederation Viability Assessment Process must link the capabilities of the resources to the intended purpose of the confederation…

•In accordance with a specific assignment of roles-to-resources

•The ONISTT project has demonstrated the ability to execute such an automated assessment process for a non-trivial use case

•A training event for Movement-to-Contact and Joint Close Air

Support

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Synopsis of Effort to Date

•ONISTT has developed:• ~60 prototype ontologies and populated them with real facts about real systems and real training tasks to form Resource KBs and Event KBs to support the FY-07 demo

•A working prototype Analyzer that:•Links KBs that describe “demand” (purpose) and “supply”

(resources) •Draws valid conclusions about purpose-aware interoperability• Go, No-go, and Inconclusive

•Notifies the human requestor the reasons behind an Inconclusive determination

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Conclusion

•ONISTT does not pretend to be a means to achieve universal interoperability among an arbitrary collection of heterogeneous systems for an arbitrary purpose

•The ONISTT approach provides the means to automate the decision process to determine if “good enough” interoperability can be achieved among a specific collection of heterogeneous systems for a specific purpose based on “figure of merit” measures

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To Learn More…

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Questions