NAVOCEANO Web Services: online data and functionality for the warfighter

CHIPS, Jan-March, 2005 by Peter Washburn, Terry Morris

We maximize America's Sea Power by applying relevant oceanographic knowledge across the full spectrum of warfare.

Naval Oceanographic Office Mission Statement

For more than 170 years, NAVOCEANO has provided tactical environmental information and services to the U.S. Navy. By providing documentation, analysis, databases and data processing, NAVOCEANO serves the mission of the warfighter. A key to this success has been our ability to adapt to meet the dynamic needs of the warfighter. or The Department of Defense (DoD) is currently undergoing a transformation to a new Net-Centric architecture that takes advantage of Web-based technologies in order to maintain warfighters' information superiority on the changing battle spaces of today's world. The key objectives of the DoD Net-Centric strategy are (1) ensuring that tactical data are visible, available and usable to accelerate decision making; (2) tagging all data with metadata (data about data) to facilitate data discovery by users; (3) posting all data to shared spaces to provide access to all users except when limited by security, policy or regulations; and (4) advancing the DoD interoperability from point-to-point interfaces to enable many-to-many data exchanges.

A major contributor to the DoD's ability to more rapidly plan and execute operations is the increasing use of Information Management and Information Technology (IM/IT). Environmental databases and environmental prediction systems must be easily accessible to our customers through state-of-the-art IM/IT systems. To meet this challenge, NAVOCEANO has endeavored to become fully integrated in the Navy Marine Corps Portal (NMCP), FORCENet and a full participant in Net-Centric Warfare. Web services are crucial to the effective transfer of tactical data and increased system functionality.

NAVOCEANO's Strategic Plan includes objectives such as: (1) developing methods of employing NAVOCEANO assets to impact operational time scales; and (2) assuring responsiveness and impact to operational needs. Migration to Web services is one way to achieve these objectives, making the vast amount of data, information, and oceanographic knowledge at NAVOCEANO visible in the Net-Centric Warfare arena.

What is a Web service?

A Web service, according to the World Wide Web Consortium, is a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described in a machine-processable format called WSDL or Web Service Definition Language. Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using Simple Object Access Protocol or SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. A Web service allows the free exchange of data and functionality between Web-based applications, thereby providing data and support to users. The result is faster delivery of accurate, more consistent information for the user.

The NAVOCEANO Web Services Working Group (NWSWG) was established in 2003 to begin the transformation process to Net-Centric Warfare. The NWSWG is chartered to develop Web services for NAVOCEANO environmental models, databases and software applications. The NWSWG provides a focal point for NAVOCEANO's efforts to develop robust Web Services in support of Net-Centric Warfare. When these Web services are fully established, NAVOCEANO will be able to provide relevant data and analysis to the warfighter, allowing the warfighter to exploit environmental advantages or mitigate environmental problems, thus bringing power to the edge.

The heart of NAVOCEANO Web Services is the Joint Meteorology and Oceanography (METOC) Data Services Framework (JMDSF). Early in the development of Web Services, NAVOCEANO realized the need for a framework that would unify all the services. This framework would allow one service to call or interact with another service, which meant there had to be a way to share data in a consistent manner. In order to provide robust support, this framework is based on the Joint METOC Broker Language (JMBL), which is based upon the Joint METOC Conceptual Data Model (JMCDM).

The JMDSF is a robust toolkit for deploying data-oriented services (DOS) to securely deliver geospatial information consistent with the JMBL specification. These enterprise services facilitate deployment of data-oriented services to computers linked together by a proxy server. The framework provides services for analyzing JMBL requests, determining the best data-oriented services for answering them, passing requests to data-oriented services, collecting responses with return values, and returning the results to the requester. The JMDSF will be the key to establishing a single access point for all METOC data.

Why JMBL?

Joint military operations often reveal a lack of interoperability between Navy and U.S. Air Force METOC systems. The JMCDM, a logical data model, was created in 1995 to integrate the geophysical data requirements of all DoD components. The JMCDM and its supporting encyclopedia are a subset of the DoD Enterprise Data Model. The Joint METOC Interoperability Board (JMIB), chartered by the Navy and Air Force, was tasked with addressing interoperability issues. The Data Standards Working Group, chartered by JMIB, established the JMBL. The JMBL schema provides an XML representation of the JMCDM and establishes a single interface for requesting and retrieving METOC data.