High-performance, Large Scale Data Handling in Tactical Environments

In a competitive, dynamic, resource-scarce, and frequently hostile external environment as well as in a complex, diversified, and large internal system, it is increasingly important for organizations to react as quickly and precisely as possible to new and continuously growing challenges. Large organization and the government, in general, and the Department of Defense, in particular, are facing increasing levels of information sharing, exchange, and collaboration coupled with the necessity to maintain high levels of interoperability along with security, trust, integrity, efficiency, consistency, etc. Much progress has been made in recent years towards defining standards that enable improved information sharing and interoperability. New, especially XML based, standards (e.g. SOA) enable disparate systems to communicate with one another. These technologies also enable discovery of services through the use of metadata and related techniques. In this work we propose to take a further step and use ontologies (e.g. OWL based JC3IEDM) to provide semantically-sound techniques for better implementation of information management functions. This will provide the basis for a truly dynamic interoperability that will allow heterogeneous systems to reuse and leverage their capabilities without dramatic changes to their individual structures.