Harmony: Tools for Metadata Harmonization and Mediation

Making data visible, accessible and understandable are cornerstones of the DoD’s Net-Centric Data Strategy. The creation of duplicative data and redundant capabilities often results from consumers’ inability to locate and understand data assets that meet their needs. Without semantic alignment of the Common Cryptologic Data Model, the DCGS-A Metadata Catalog and POR descriptive metadata, information discovery and exploitation will not be fully realized by Defense and Intelligence Communities of Interest (COIs). Semantic metadata harmonization at design time and mediation at runtime can provide significant improvements to current approaches to arguably the most difficult net-centric objectives: visibility and understandability. Modus Operandi proposes Harmony, an innovative tool to harmonize disparate metadata models (ontologies) through analysis of the lexical and semantic elements of each metadata model. Harmony will solve the visibility and understandability challenges and will empower analysts with the ability to leverage semantic discovery, search and retrieval across the net-centric Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) domain. The overall result will be to improve production, analysis and dissemination of ISR products.