Title:                Semantic SOA: Key Technologies for DoD Net-Centric Computing

Speaker:          Tom Velez, CTA

Abstract:
The vision of Net-Centric Computing is driving an ambitious DoD technological agenda focused on pervasive adoption of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and semantic data integration.  For instance, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has been mandated to adopt Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services based specifications including WMS, WFS, and WCS.  Huge efforts including DISA’s metadata repository and smaller efforts such as Cursor on Target (CoT) are attempting to define a common metadata syntax which will allow military and intelligence users to integrate their systems.  However, there is a growing recognition that metadata standards, although necessary, are insufficient to deal with the huge volumes of disparate data sources that require associative analysis.  As a result, there is a movement within the DoD and IC communities towards development of semantic frameworks (domain ontologies, FOL rules, agents/web services) that provide foundations for highly distributed, wireless, context-based systems:  “Systems that Know”.  Web Service technologies such as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI provide the infrastructure for extensive interoperability while emerging Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, OWL-S and DL “reasoners” such as Pellet, provide the “standard” building blocks for required machine understanding, knowledge representation, and dynamic service composition.

This talk will review key, recent examples of such efforts: Space-Based Radar Constellation, Distributed Common Ground Station (DCGS), Net-Centric Collaborative Targeting (NCCT) and a recently developed agent framework that exploits Tactical Targeting Network Technology (TTNT/AIMPOINT).