Metatopia Conference 2007

Cross-Boundary Data Sharing in the United States Military

Deborah Hawley Cheryl Connors Deborah Hawley
Information Systems Engineer, Sr
The MITRE Corporation

Cheryl Connors
Information System Engineer, Senior
The MITRE Corporation


Tuesday 9:45am - 10:45am

Level: Data Management - Intermediate

The United States military lives or dies on data – the right data must get to the right warfighter at the right time. Yet, the disparate systems currently utilized have incompatible vocabularies, different degrees of granularity, and are bound by different formats. The military is implementing a solution that will enable critical interoperable information exchanges between otherwise incompatible Tactical Data Link systems (e.g., Link 16, Variable Message Format, Situational Awareness Data Link). One such solution is the Objective Gateway that translates data between these disparate systems. As experienced system engineers, we will explain how this Objective Gateway concept will be employed to eliminate the competing commercial gateways being used that have increased the complexity and cost of managing the military network. We will give insights into the underlying challenges they face in adapting successful solutions and practices from the world-wide-web to the unique information exchange requirements of the 21st century warfighter.
Speaker Bio
Deborah has twenty plus years providing enterprise systems engineering support for information interoperability. She has supported the US military's weapon systems, mission planning, and tactical data links communities. Co-authored the Air Force's (AF) Tactical Data Network to Global Information Grid Roadmap, authored multiple software analytical models for military weapon systems, and received mission planning program awards. She is currently supporting the AF Global Cyberspace Integration Center (GCIC) at Langley AF Base, VA, providing expertise in enterprise systems engineering, tactical data links, interoperability and integration, service oriented architecture, web services, IPv6, and microformats.

Ms. Connors is a Senior Information Engineer working Information Interoperability solutions for the US Air Force AF Global Cyberspace Integration Center/Integration and Standards Branch (RINI) across the US Services and NATO domains. Ms. Connors’s current efforts support the migration of existing military messaging standards into a web-enabled format utilizing XML technologies in support of the DoD's 2010 vision. Ms. Connors is a lead developer for several military specifications for the XML transformation, and is the editor and a contributor to the NATO XML Naming and Design Guidelines. Ms. Connors has had prior experience in working with the US Army's migration to a digital force and in working cross-service information exchange solutions. Ms. Connors core expertise includes the XML family of technologies, including extensive hands-on development experiment with XML schemas, and ontologies. Her background includes system engineering and communication engineering experience. Ms. Connors has a BS in Computer Science, and MS in Information Systems, both from Hawaii Pacific University.
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