A NAVOCEANO and FNMOC Initiative To Implement Network-Centric METOC Support To the U.S. Military

Abstract

The U.S. Navy is undergoing a transformation from a platform-centric force to a network-centric force. The methodologies for the production and distribution of meteorological and oceanographic (METOC) information to the fleet will also be transformed. Traditionally, this information was generated at a central site and pushed to the consumer via intermediate providers who tailored products to the needs of the mission. In the new paradigm, users access Web services that will enable them to request products tailored to their specific mission requirements from centrally located production centers. This new concept of operations allows the production centers to be more responsive to consumer requirements.The Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) and the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), the two production centers for Naval METOC, have a major initiative underway to implement a network-centric approach to METOC support of the U.S. Navy and other Department of Defense customers. This paper begins with a brief overview of the concept of network-centric operations and an outline of the scope of the present initiative. The paper then describes the various parts of the initiative, including a framework for providing Web services, a standard for describing the METOC data, a suite of present and future Web capabilities, and other associated aspects. The paper concludes with a discussion of the importance of this initiative.

Adaptive Web Services Brokering

“…This standard has been mandated for adoption by the DoD MetOc community. The Navy MetOc information providers (e.g., the Naval Oceanographic Office, the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center) are chartered to make data available via Web services through a MetOc Web portal (Malley et al, 2005). In the envisioned application, a client is expected to discover MetOc Web services via the core enterprise discovery service and then use the core mediation service to translate requests to and responses from these services.…”

“…Brokering information between Web services involves two primary tasks: (1) Discovery -the identification of services that can provide relevant information, and (2) Mediation -the translation of requests and responses, which requires addressing their syntactic and semantic differences. Most brokers perform manually assisted discovery and use hand-crafted rules for mediation (e.g., Malley et al, 2005), while some other brokers prescribe that Web services should include additional domain information represented with Web ontology languages such as OWL-S (Paolucci et al, 2004;Howard & Kerschberg, 2004). However, mandating such ontological annotations in distributed and unknown organizational settings could be impractical.…”