Coping with Interoperability Challenges in Training: ONISTT Research Project Overview

1. Interoperability Viewed As an Incurable DiseaseLearning to CopeviaOpen Net-Centric Interoperability Standards for Training & Testing(ONISTT)Research Project Sponsored by ODUSD/R

2. Overview • The Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Readiness (ODUSD/R) establishes policy and provides oversight for military training • ODUSD/R has been sponsoring investigation of an overarching policy framework that would ensure interoperability among training support capabilities that are being acquired by the individual Services • That effort has morphed into: Open Net-Centric Interoperability Standards for Training & Testing (ONISTT) • This briefing provides a quick snapshot of ONISTT

3. The Need • Capability to conduct Joint/Coalition Training Events: • Without requiring all trainees to travel to a common site, use a common training capability and • Using resources* that are both available and capable of providing a good-enough environment to satisfy the training objectives * These resources are generally characterized as being eitherLive (L), Virtual (V), or Constructive (C)

4. The Constraints • Training support resources are acquired by individual Services to meet their Title 10 responsibilities • The capabilities needed to execute Joint training events are not available from any single resource Need multiple resources to work together in synergy* to collectively supply the needed capabilities • The resources available are not specifically designed to work together * Multiple resources working together in synergy = definition of interoperability

5. Therefore…  Need for a quick way to create a temporary lash-up of available LVC resources that (collectively) provide a specific set of capabilities • “Quick”  hours, days, weeks – but not years • Traditional labor-intensive “BOGSAT” approach not acceptable • The list of available resources changes from day-to-day and event-to-event • The resources were not specifically designed to work together • The resources do not conform to a single set of common technical standards • And, realistically, never will -- since they are not “owned” by any single organization

6. A Long Name for this Problem • Automated composition of improvisational machine-to-machine (m2m) interoperability

7. Categorizing Interoperability Ex: Presentation by Andreas Tolk (VMASC/ODU)

8. DoD Service Registry Other Discovery Catalogs DoD Discovery Catalog Data Producer Data Consumer NCDS: Enabling Unanticipated Users Data exchanged across engineered, well-defined interfaces System A System B Register Structural Metadata Known User of System A Data Post/Expose Data Provide Discovery Metadata DoD Metadata Registry Shared Space “Pull” Structural Metadata “Pull” Data Query Catalog(s) System X Unanticipated User of System A Data

9. DoD Service Registry Other Discovery Catalogs DoD Discovery Catalog Data Producer Data Consumer ONISTT Objective: Unanticipated Confederations of Systems System A System B Known User of System A Data Register Structural Metadata System X Provide Discovery Metadata Unanticipated member of an A-B-X confederation DoD Metadata Registry

10. Key Question • What collection of standards can be imposed on System X to ensure it will be able to interact with A & B to supply needed capabilities that are missing from the confederation?

11. If this problem was a disease, is there a “cure”? • Short answer: No – it is fundamentally incurable  There’s no such thing as a universal “Swiss Army resource”

12. This is a real product from Wenger SA (manufacturers of the Swiss Army knife) Has 85 tools and weighs 2 pounds Suggested retail price = $1,200

13. Is there a “cure” for this disease? • Longer answer: Some incurable diseases are not altogether hopeless – there are possible palliative measures that can help the patient cope with the malady and (within limits) enjoy a reasonable quality of life • The ONISTT project is focused on developing such palliative measures

14. ONISTT -- What it Is • ONISTT is: • A framework, vocabulary, and formal language for describing precise objective details about: • “Demand” – activities required to support training & testing events, including the capabilities needed from LVC resources to support necessary interactions among them • “Supply” – The capabilities of available from specific LVC resources • An automated interoperability assessment tool that determines if the supply can satisfy the demand • A means of capturing and preserving knowledge from SMEs about supply and demand in this domain

15. ONISTT -- what is it based on? • ONISTT builds upon foundational NCO tenets from: • Net-Centric Data Strategy (NCDS) • Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) • ONISTT extends those tenets with technology derived from the Semantic Web initiative • Ontologies, OWL (the Web Ontology Language), Knowledge Base (KB) structures, and automated reasoning environments

16. ONISTT -- what’s the trick? • Recognizing that it is impossible to assess the viability of a candidate lash-up (“confederation”) based only on the properties of the resources • Viability of a candidate confederation also depends on: • The intended purpose (for forming that confederation) and • Precisely what capabilities each resource is expected to (a) supply-to and (b) extract-from the confederation

17. ONISTT -- What it Is Not • ONISTT is not: • Yet another “interoperability architecture” • A replacement for any existing interoperability enabler (e.g., TENA, HLA, DIS) • A replacement for a human event planner • A silver bullet that makes any resource interoperable with any other resource for any possible purpose

18. Lessons Learned from FY-07 Demo • Automating LVC composition requires assessing the viability of a candidate confederation of resources • The LVC Confederation Viability Assessment Process must link the capabilities of the resources to the intended purpose of the confederation… • In accordance with a specific assignment of roles-to-resources • The ONISTT project has demonstrated the ability to execute such an automated assessment process for a non-trivial use case • A training event for Movement-to-Contact and Joint Close Air Support

19. Synopsis of Effort to Date • ONISTT has developed: • ~60 prototype ontologies and populated them with real facts about real systems and real training tasks to form Resource KBs and Event KBs to support the FY-07 demo • A working prototype Analyzer that: • Links KBs that describe “demand” (purpose) and “supply” (resources) • Draws valid conclusions about purpose-aware interoperability • Go, No-go, and Inconclusive • Notifies the human requestor the reasons behind an Inconclusive determination

20. Conclusion • ONISTT does not pretend to be a means to achieve universal interoperability among an arbitrary collection of heterogeneous systems for an arbitrary purpose • The ONISTT approach provides the means to automate the decision process to determine if “good enough” interoperability can be achieved among a specific collection of heterogeneous systems for a specific purpose based on “figure of merit” measures

21. To Learn More…

22. Questions