Interoperability

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Interoperability

• J E Holmes
• British Embassy
• 99-01-12

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Real Interoperability

• J E Holmes
• British Embassy
• 99-01-12

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Presentation

• Interoperability?
• Sharing and Exploiting Information
• Operational Context
• Information
• Technicalities

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Interoperability?
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Great Idea!
Real Interoperability?
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Interoperability . ..operationally
beneficial. exchange of services... .systems,
units or forces. (operational, procedural,
technical)
NATO
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Sharing and Exploiting Information
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The Operational Context Features of Operations
Other Than War - 1/3

• Combined and Joint Operations
• Strategic Direction and ROEs
• Multiple Adversaries
• local agendas
• casualties
• different perspective on issues
• Uncertain Operations
• Complex Coalition Force C2 Organisation
• Appropriateness of Legacy Systems

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Features of OOTW 2/3

• Decision Making often involves soft factors
• Decision Processes are less structured
• Operational Effectiveness needs
  re-interpretation
• containment of risk/threat
• casualties
• collateral damage
• cost
• Media Attention

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Features of OOTW 3/3

• Best exploitation of advanced technology
• Implementation using COTS products
• Operational justification and costs
• Rapid Assembly of supporting CIS

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Operational Imperatives

• Force Projection
• Constrain Adversarys freedoms and block
  aggressive potential
• Influence Adversarys ability for decision making
• Manage (media) reporting
• verification of incidents
• apportionment of responsibility
• counter propaganda
• Be accepted as impartial

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Information In-Theatre Issue

• The rapid deployment of Forces, and Theatre-wide
  operations demand seamless information exchange
  across significant geographical and
  organisational diversity and scale
• Information Systems must handle organisational
  diversity and scale, together with rapid
  evolutionary development
• Dont forget the supporting systems back home

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The Information Problem
Current interactions - bi-lateral information
services - constraint Multi-lateral information
services - reduced constraints (most of the
information needed for most tasks, most of the
time)
SECURITY
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Information Services

• The required services are characterised by
• availability, transparency, predictability,
  ubiquity, security, traceability, flexibility

and by predictable (but not necessarily high)
Quality of Service such as timeliness,
capacity, integrity, safety, security,
reliability, coherence (spatial and temporal),
and cost
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Raising capital is not as hard as some people
believe.
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Technicalities

• RD into INTEROPERABILITY, since 1990
• Building on on-going work
• Influencing on-going work
• Economic re-use of Legacy Systems
• Interception of new developments
• Methods and Tools

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Interoperability

• Shared Organisational Objectives and Compatible
  Goals (plus policy)
• Decision Processes Information Needs
• Corporate Objectives Management
• Compatible Systems Engineering
• Economics of Development Testing

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On-Going Work

• Civil Sector standards ISO/IEC, ITU-T
  (CCITT), OMG, IETF
• Concentration on novel aspects (risk reduction)
• Frameworks for Systems Engineering
• Quality of Service (IS13236 X.641)
• Open Distributed Processing (IS10746 X.900)
• Object Management Architecture (OMA)common
  ancestry Advanced Network Systems Architecture

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Influence of New Work

• QoS in ODP for ISO/IEC ITU-T editor
• OMG Green Paper on QoS chair and editor
• OMG Business Object domain Task Force
  UK
  inputs
• OMG C4I Special Interest Group UK co-chair
• QOSR work in IETF UK participants

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Economic Re-Use of Legacy Systems

• Significant investment and maintenance problem
• To re-use or not to re-use, that is the
  question.
• Wrapper and screen-scraper technologies
• Small teams OO technology for affordable cost
  timescale
• Policy and Management problem
• Think Information Services first, Systems second

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Interception of New Developments

• JAVA? for machine independence
• JAVA? applets and the security question
• Unified Modelling Language (OMG)

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Methods and Tools

• ODP as a sound basis for modelling concepts
• Object Modelling Technique (Rumbaugh Blaha)
• Select/OMT, Select Enterprise (PC, a few k)
• Extend ODP with the QoS concepts
• Goal A sound engineering basis for describing
  and relating 1. organisations to information
  services 2. information services to systems

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and we can save 900 Lira by not taking soil
tests.
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The Bottom Line

• Interoperability is difficult, complex,
  multi-dimensional, non-static, and often ad-hoc.
• Information Services need to be ubiquitous, of
  the right quality and cost, and future-proof.
• Systems need to be capable of supporting these
  services across space and time.

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