2004 Euro Simulation Interoperability Workshop Edinburgh, Scotland, June 2004 Moving towards a Lingua Franca for M&S and C3I – Developments concerning the C2IEDM Dr. Andreas Tolk Virginia Modeling Analysis & Simulation Center (VMASC) Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA 23529 atolk@odu.edu Keywords: C2IEDM, Data Engineering, Data Management, Data Alignment, Data Administration ABSTRACT: Under the umbrella of NATO, the ATCCIS Permanent Working Group developed the Army/Allied Tactical Command and Control Information System (ATCCIS) Data Model for a couple of years, establishing an unprecedented amount of international agreement on information exchange requirements on the battlefield. The model was recently established as the Allied Data Publication Standard No. 32 (AdatP-32) under the name “Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM).” As the concepts are not bound to land services, the name was changed to “Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM).” An alternative name used referring to the same model is “Generic Hub” or “Battlefield Generic Hub.” Due to its high level of maturity, this data model also became the data model of the Multilateral Interoperability Program (MIP), established by NATO to interconnect their C3I systems. Although various prototypes using the ATCCIS/C2IEDM data model to connect C3I and M&S systems have been presented to SISO in the recent past, the concept is approaching a new quality, as various projects and concepts are starting to adapt the ideas. Following some general concepts dealing with the challenges of correct linguistic information mapping, this paper will give a short history of the development and first prototypes and an overview on actual projects, in particular the Extensible Battle Management Language (XBML) project. Furthermore, it will extrapolate how – if the proposed route is followed – the ATCCIS/C2IEDM data model can become the backbone for a common ontology for military information exchange in coalitions of services, nations, and system families, such as C3I and M&S. 1. Introduction The “Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM)” may best be described as an idea whose time has finally come. The idea itself is trivial: In order to have an unambiguous specification of information exchange requirements (IER), this specification must be standardized. However, before the C2IEDM could begin its march towards victory, many prejudices had to be overcome. The challenge with IER is that they change as rapidly as do the application domains. To standardize IER in a dynamic environment requires a lot of modeling expertise on the one hand and a lot of expertise in the application domain on the other. Many experts therefore expected this to be a never-ending task and preferred to implement working one-to-one solutions. Furthermore, many system developers refuse to evaluate IER standards because they misunderstand that the IER standards don’t mandate the implementation of their application. Agreeing to use a given IER protocol doesn’t mean that the objects to be exchanged must also be used internally. The NATO environment delivered the necessary ingredients for a successful approach to cope with this issue: short notice collaborations using multinational and multilateral connections, often limited to legacy systems, delimited by decreasing budgets for continually growing numbers of interfaces in the operational contexts of multi-service, multi-nation, multi-echelon, and ill-defined task constraints all over the world. Military heterogeneity could not be better defined. Not only became clear that soldiers would need to operate with their own systems in such an environment, it was also obvious that the introduction of one common system to fulfill everybody’s needs was not technically feasible. Therefore, a common approach merging the existing systems and building a solid basis for future developments, in the sense of additional integrations or common new procurements to improve the existent architecture, was needed. To this end, the approach to use a common information exchange model for all 04E-SIW-016 1