IST-101-RSY-024 S1.1 UNCLASSIFIED UNCLASSIFIED Demonstrating a Successful Strategy for Network Enabled Capability Michael Lambert 1 , Chris Partridge 2 , Michael Loneragan 1 , Andrew Mitchell 2 1 QinetiQ, Portsdown Technology Park, Southwick Road, Cosham, Portsmouth, Hants, PO6 3RU, United Kingdom 2 BORO Solutions Limited 25 Hart Street, Henley on Thames, Oxfordshire, RG9 2AR, United Kingdom mjlambert@QinetiQ.com, partridgec@borogroup.co.uk, mjloneragan@QinetiQ.com, mitchella@borogroup.co.uk ABSTRACT Responsive, agile, collaborative planning and execution is a key requirement for the development of a successful Network Enabled Capability (NEC), whether at the national or international level. This paper makes the case that it is not possible to achieve this agility without solving the semantic interoperability problem. The semantic issues facing NATO’s Network Enabled Capability (NNEC) are also faced by its members in their national NECs. There are currently many proposed strategies attempting to address these issues. Finding the one that will provide the hoped for integration and at the same time only cause minimal changes to existing infrastructure is a major challenge. In this situation it is vital to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of a strategy. This paper presents the findings from a project tasked with both identifying a strategy and demonstrating its effectiveness - the Joint Tactical Air Defence Integration System (JTADIS) project. This project was funded by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) and undertaken by QinetiQ – the semantic analysis was undertaken by BORO Solutions. 1.0 INTRODUCTION Some time ago the UK MoD realised that it had a significant number of Air Defence (AD) Command and Control (C2) legacy systems that were procured as domain specific and so not capable of being integrated to deliver the increased agility needed for Joint Force AD. They asked the defence technology company QinetiQ to formulate an innovative solution and demonstrate it in the Tactical AD-C2 environment using a representative sample of these existing legacy systems. This was seen as a good test case for the kind of semantic interoperability needed for Network Enabled Capability (NEC). This paper describes the implemented QinetiQ PACE-based (Planning And Collaborative Execution) solution which included an SIE (Semantic Interoperability Engine) from BORO Solutions. It outlines the physical and semantic architecture that was developed to support this approach – a key feature of PACE and SIE is a flexibility that allows users to configure data structures as they evolve to meet changing requirements. It describes how ontology was deployed within that architecture; supporting PACE’s evolving data structures and providing the SIE with the semantic mappings between the legacy systems.