's Blog

Empire Challenge 2008 (EC08), an event led by the U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), wrapped up a month’s worth of real time interoperability exercises at NAWCWD China Lake involving 1,500 contractors, military, and civilian Department of Defense employees as well as about 250 coalition allies.

In association with the Open Geospatial Consortium, Northrop Grumman Information Technology and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center successfully demonstrated secure execution of workflows and just-in-time custom data production.

“This is the first step towards our cross-domain SensorWeb to be activated during emergencies and major disasters to allow bi-directional data exchange between DOD and Civilian organizations for the purpose of saving lives“, says Dan Mandl, the EO-1 Project Director. The NASA team includes many partners such as Vightel, SGT, University of Maryland, George Mason… It has been involved in standards development and interoperability demonstrations for many years and recently received the prestigious R&D100 award.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Pilot initiative served as a focal point for multi-intelligence geospatial and sensor interoperability in EC 08. The OGC is an international standards organization comprised of over 360 companies, universities, and government agencies whose main goal is defining and propagating standards for geospatial information, and 2008 was the first year of participation for the OGC Pilot initiative in Empire Challenge.

As part of its support to the OGC Pilot, Northrop Grumman IT successfully integrated hundreds of disparate sensors from a variety of organizations and vendors using OGC Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards including NOAA weather stations, the NASA EO-1 satellite, a variety of Unattended Ground Sensors (UGS) provided through the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Sensor Web program, sensors onboard a TigerShark Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) provided by ERDAS, and a long-range electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) video sensor provided by ArgonST. PULSENetTM successfully shared the NASA and NOAA sensor data with other exercise participants and across security domains, including providing NASA EO-1 National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF) imagery to the NSG-Forward initiative, an NGA prototype system for Defense Common Ground/Surface System (DCGS)/DCGS Integration Backbone (DIB) based processing and exploitation of sensor data. By providing sensor data from NASA and NOAA, PULSENetTM was one of the only systems in EC 08 supplying civilian agency data in support of the DoD/IC community demonstration and helped to pave the way for a cross-domain sensor web that allows for sharing sensor data between civilian and military agencies, a critical capability in humanitarian and disaster relief efforts.

It is official: SensorWeb 2.0 has been recognized as one of the most technologically significant products introduced in the marketplace over the past year by the independent judging panel and editors of R&D Magazine.

The Award ceremony will take place Oct 16, 2008 in Chicago. This is a huge effort. We have some big contributors on the team including NASA GSFC, Ames, JPL and universities such as Maryland, George Mason, UAH…and let’s not forget Northrop Grumann. Congratulations to all.

Thanks to the Open GeoSpatial Consortium’s help with standard development. This is tedious work but nonetheless important.

This is far from being over for us though. The next step is to integrate DOD and civilian assets into a larger cross-domain Sensorweb for emergency response. We have a big demo coming in October… Stand-by for more later.

Working together through seamless interoperability, we can make a difference and save lives.

This would not have been possible without the precursor effort at the Naval Research Laboratory with the Virtual Mission Operations Center (VMOC) designed to support what is known today as the Operational Responsive Space. Thanks to Greg Glaros, the visionary at the Office of Force Transformation now heading Synexxus, and Michael Hurley at NRL.

Note: The first R&D 100 Awards were given in 1963. Many entries over the years have become household names, including Polacolor film (1963), the flashcube (1965), the automated teller machine (1973), the halogen lamp (1974), the fax machine (1975), the liquid crystal display (1980), the printer (1986), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), the Nicoderm antismoking patch (1992), Taxol anticancer drug (1993), lab on a chip (1996), and HDTV (1998).

Winners of the 2008 R&D 100 Awards appear in this month’s issue of R&D Magazine.

It finally happened! The WfMC and the OGC just signed a Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU) to cooperate in advancing standards-based, interoperable work flow and Web-enabled geospatial content sharing, modeling and visualization to address the needs of their members.

This is a big deal for WfXML and our RESTful approach to workflow management. OGC has been very successful in standard development through continuous interoperability demonstrations and pilot programs. So you will see more news in the near future.

As part of this MOU, we will continue the integration of RESTful Workflows (WfXML) with XPDL, BPMN as well as other OGC standards to power the NASA SensorWeb with many of the OGC and WfMC organizational members.

Please, Come and Join us. This is going to be fun!

Since Sandy Kemsley asked the question, I will try to attempt to explain this a second time.

Architecture & Process 2008 is a great avenue to expose users & architects to new key technologies.

Enterprise Architecture and current BPM initiatives are pretty much based on a SOAP-based architecture. This is a wonderful high-octane technology, if you and your pit crew can afford it. But this is reserved to an elite group targeting a niche market: Corporate America 500 that can afford it.

WfXML-R targets that rest of the market (or the remaining 80% of it) with a simpler approach based on several Web 2.0 standards and protocols including Atom/AtomPub, GData, OpenSearch and OpenID/OAuth to manage user authentication, secure transactions and user authority delegation to workflows. The last two standards were the final keystones to a RESTful architecture that can be used at the Enterprise level.

So what is this doing at this Conference? Hummmmm????

An RESTful interoperable and non-proprietary standard sponsored by the WfMC and the OpenGeoSpatial Consortium will be a huge achievement for this Community.

The OGC demonstrated three interoperable workflow engines during OWS-5 using WfXML-R inclusing OpenWFE and a BPEL engine. Hitachi Interstage and the SUNGARD Carnot may very well be next based on discussions we had this week.

It is at least satisfying that some other people such as Jason Woodruff got it right away and seem pretty excited about it. And yes, Jason, Interface 3 could be another one that ought to be included. But not this time! BPAF is next and I will let Michael zur Muelhen announce it very soon :).

After three days working with the WfMC technical committee in Washigton DC this week, Wf-XML will hopefully get its official RESTful bindings very soon. Keith Swenson has been extremely supportive and enthusiastic about the effort. We will probably see the Fujitsu Interstage engine sporting the new bindings following closely the efforts on the SUNGARD Carnot engine led by Michael zur Muehlen and Phil Hansen at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ. There are rumors of a possible interoperability bake-off to be announced in a few months…Hummmm…Stand-by!

An intersting question came up. How do you explain the difference between SOAP and REST in less than 30 seconds without using any technical terms?

Let’s try this metaphor:

Toyota Camry: Great american favorite, inexpensive, easy to drive, low maintenance, last forever… You can pass it on to your kids.

Toyota Indy complete with Pit Crew Support – High technology, exciting, cool, expensive, needs that crew. Is this for your market?

Is this getting close?