Latest in OA Innovation and C4ISR Gordon A Hunt, Principal – TRG Systems FACE Advisory Board, UCS WG, CDR USN-R OA Summit, Washington DC. 04 November 2014

Overview Where we are… What’s the challenge… What’s been done… Current progress… Where we are going…

Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) with Standard Key Interfaces Common Domain Capabilities via Product-Lines Common Domain Capabilities Common Data Capabilities Common Infrastructure Layered Architectures Modular Architectures Ad Hoc Architectures Where we are… OSA - Evolution of DoD Combat Systems Logical progress of architectural separation of concerns

What’s the Challenge… C4I spans a much larger set of systems… Not in the same domain Not managed/funded by the same PM Leverage different TRFs Different timelines for integration and technology refresh cycles

What’s the Challenge… What makes this hard? There isn’t a common interface specification… Different temporal constraints and requirements… We can’t standardize on one protocol… Configuration & implementations vary… It that is? Something else, at the root? It’s the data’s content, context & behavior It’s an integration scalability problem

What’s been done… Where else has content, context and behavior been thoroughly defined? Compilers! Syntax – content Semantics – context Operations – behavior Consider what’s been done with these rigorous definitions…

What’s been done… What made this compile (e.g. a transform) possible? Machine readable, rigorous, and closed input specification Machine readable, rigorous, and closed output specification Machine readable ‘rules’. Something like Extended Backus– Naur Form Define “Rigorous”? Solid mathematical basis & foundations. Symbols and a set of operations on the symbols – source code Symbols and a set of operations on the symbols – assembly Mapping (affine transformation) between these sets Not just machine readable - XML is machine readable. Must be machine understandable

What’s been done… What made this transform possible? Machine readable, rigorous, and closed input, output, and rules specifications Something like Extended Backus–Naur Form Define “Rigorous”? Solid mathematical basis & foundations. Not just machine readable Must be machine understandable

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integratability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic … What system architecture property drives/enables understandability?

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integratability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic …

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integratability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic …

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integratability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic …

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integratability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic …

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integratability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic …

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integrateability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic … Levels of Interoperability: Ability to move stuff around. Plugs and sockets, bit and bytes

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integrateability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic … Levels of Interoperability: Many efforts defining domain specific data Addressing the definition of message (ICD) syntax How to inform the machine about content of data

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integrateability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic … Levels of Interoperability: Defining what is being said, context and semantics The meaning of the data, to include representation NOT – more content to added to the messages

Current progress… Modularity Reusability Extensibility Portability Integrateability Interoperability Technical Syntactic Semantic More… Levels of Interoperability: Get to this in a moment….

Technical Reference Frameworks Important piece, necessary but not sufficient Standards make up the TRFs

Current progress… FACE™ Architecture Data Syntax Data Semantics “Rules” of structure UCS Working Group Data Architecture Content (ICDs) Context (Structure) Behavior (Domain) Others as well…

Current progress… FACE™ Architecture Data Syntax Data Semantics “Rules” of structure UCS Working Group Data Architecture Content (ICDs) Context (Structure) Behavior (Domain) Others as well… Semantics Syntax

Demystifying Semantic Data Models… Different than what almost everyone has experience with And, can fade into the background once ‘complete’ Need to separate the CONTENT, and the CONTEXT That is, what is being said versus why/where/how/when/who it is said. ICDs we build now formally specify the what and imply the rest – from a machines point of view System appropriate and optimize ICDs still/will need to be created and maintained. It’s the machine understandable formalism that is being added

Current progress… Technical Interoperability IPv4, IPv6, UDP, TCP, RTSP, … Syntactic Interoperability ICDs, IDDs, …. Working Semantic Interoperability UCS WG, FACE™ Past efforts tried to jump straight to Pragmatic & Dynamic interoperability Still work here need to make it machine readable

Current progress… An Example Two message definitions – talking about the same thing, or not? enum AlarmLevel { GREEN, RED, YELLOW, NO_STATUS, NORMAL }; struct alertType : Header { float x, y, z; double set_angle; AlarmLevel status; }; public final class VehicleStatus implements java.io.Serializable { public String ID = null; public Position3D_WGS84 location = null; public EngineSpeed_RadiansPerSec speed = null; public VehicleStatus (String _id,... ) {.... } ??

Current progress… An Example Two message definitions – talking about the same thing, or not? Demonstrations have shown this to work! Still more to do, but really exciting. Interesting with small number of messages, powerful with 1000’s ICD Verification & Data Rights Own the rights things with the right level of detail

Where are we going… Pragmatic and Dynamic Interoperability Concerns… The ‘data of behavior’ which informs the transformation Have – Service descriptions and human understandable forms Needed – the machine understandable equivalents. Its hard, is takes time and there is no magic transform Take a page from history, it can be done Have to be rigorous in the rules We can’t stop current progress