General Interoperability Toolkit: Migrating Shipbuilding Interoperability Tools to Cross-Domain Functionality

One of the most significant challenges facing the Defense Industry today is the lack of interoperability between software applications. Weapons systems data is voluminous, complex, and distributed across many disparate applications. Typically, only a few of these applications are truly integrated and manual processes are required to synchronize data maintained across multiple systems. Users must manually "integrate" the data in these applications by generating separate reports from multiple sources, adding missing data, and manually verifying the results. The resulting system is an inefficient, uncontrollable, inflexible set of software tools, which neither meet the needs of the DoD or fulfill the needs of the programs and missions that they were designed to serve. This lack of system integration and interoperability is quite evident within the DoD legacy systems. There are hundreds of specialized systems for design, requirements, maintenance, maintenance planning, operation, logistics, technical manuals, drawings, training, personnel, supply, and analysis. Any planning or investigative activity necessarily involves interaction with several systems. Nevertheless, there is no interface to provide the user with an integrated view of this data. What is currently lacking is an open, adaptable interoperability solution which can integrate data across DoD legacy systems.