Research Summaries

Back Distributed Common Ground System - Navy and Cloud Computing-Destovepiping Informationofrmation to the Warfighter

Fiscal Year 2014
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Unrein, Louis T.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary A. Rather than apply the DCGS-N Inc. 2 database model on "tracks or track IDs" from a track management system, how can an Entity-Attribute Value (EAV)/Entity Value Estimator (EVE) model be designed that would describe entities where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) is potentially vast, but the number that will actually apply to a given entity on a user's display is relatively modest, perhaps based on the mission requirements of the user. What are pitfalls to this approach? Can this work in real time to support fusion? I&W? What technical and policy challenges are there to making data, both current and archived, available or accessible to DCGS-N? The EVE concept is currently being demonstrated with NRO/Navy.
B. How can a maritime semantic vocabulary be defined (based on Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples) that shows the relationships between ships, their technical data, Automated Identification System (AIS), intelligence data (ELINT, COMINT, ACINT, HUMINT, GEOINT, etc.) tied to a ship), along with crew and cargo data associated to ships? The eventual scope of this effort could be integrated into a C5ISR solution, exploring how it could enable a multi-framework approach within the Navy. Research would explore how data from programs such as SEMANTICA and ONI's SeaLINK can be discoverable, and their data automatically linked to representative symbologies in DCGS-N.
C. What are technical solutions to making data more accessible and ingestible into DCGS-N, to satisfy various intelligence workflows? Answers to questions about a given target may come from reports generated by sensors, intelligence centers, or archived files at the organic (ship), strike group, fleet, theater, or national levels, to include military intelligence commands and national intel agencies. How can discovery of information be automated to increase on-demand knowledge of the battlespace, and decrease the effort spent collecting and fusing the information itself, from many disparate sources? Research would explore how Tripwire Analytic Capability (TAC), which currently accomplishes this for intelligence analysts across the IC, could be ingested into DCGS-N and leveraged.
D. Cloud computing solutions are becoming a staple of daily personal and professional life - but in order to work, they require exquisite bandwidth and connectivity, which many take for granted. Not so for a ship at sea, especially with a determined and agile adversary who will actively seek to deny communications links to, and thereby blinding situational awareness and severing Command and Control for, U.S. forces in times of conflict. If available data pipes are reduced and bandwidth constricted, how will information sources be weighted, to ensure the operational forces will still receive the most important, mission-critical information? Research would include examination of the Office of Naval Research, Naval Tactical Cloud (NTC) Limited Test Experiment (LTE) effort.
E. What technical and policy solutions remain to be achieved, to get more collaborative buy-in, across all DOD and IC information and intelligence providers, to make finished intelligence reports and products from all INTs, and raw national or tactical data feeds, etc. available for fusion into DCGS-N? Research would continue work that has already been done in this area, at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO). Data requirements for ongoing programs such as Command and Control Rapid Prototype Continuum (C2RPC), Magic Mirror (MM), and Situational Awareness and Visual Analytics (SAVA) would be addressed.
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Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal