Todd spent time after the forum responding to all the questions, submitted via e-mail mostly from DOD domains. Here are a selection of those questions and Todd’s answers:

QUESTION: A net-centric approach is a great idea. But won’t it be too difficult to implement? Won’t IP Version 6, WiMAX [IEEE 802.16] and all the other developing standards be too costly to integrate after deployment?
TODD: We cannot afford to stand still. We must build in more agile, flexible designs. By decoupling the data from the applications and exposing the standards used, we expect to ease the transition to newer technologies.

QUESTION: What is being done to define terms like organization, document and location, which are common to a great many communities of interest? If these definitions are too loose, they will lose their value.
TODD: Agreed. We have defined a common set of tags in the DOD Discovery Metadata Specification (DDMS) based on the international standard Dublin Core for categorizing data. This is a minimal set of standard tags that a specific community of interest (COI) could extend with attributes for their specific data vocabulary as a schema.

COIs focusing on financial data or medical data can define community-specific attributes as extensions to DDMS. COIs would register their schema in the DOD Metadata Registry for enterprise visibility, access, understanding and reuse to avoid duplication.

QUESTION: Have any Defense pilot projects developed ontologies, semantic mappings, and metadata repositories and registries?
TODD: We have been populating our metadata registry for several years. We are at various stages of maturity in the development of common vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies and semantic mappings. We are learning to crawl before we walk, walk before we run as it relates to the sophistication in our data representations and the relationships between data and its uses.

QUESTION: Are there any non-DOD organizations or commercial companies moving to a net-centric model?
TODD: There appear to be trends in this direction across the medical and banking industries, to name a couple. Developing data vocabularies and using Web-based technologies to expose the data, while leveraging service-oriented architectures, are not solely the domain of DOD.

The push for improved federal, state and local information sharing is following similar patterns, though the term net-centric may not necessarily be used.

For more questions and answers about the net-centric data strategy, go to www.defensesystems.com and enter 105 in the Quickfind search box. To read a transcript from the original online forum between Michael Todd and Defense Systems’ Dawn S. Onley, enter 106.

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