ARMY AL&T


“There are interoperability shortfalls across functional boundaries, services, and nations,” said Marvin Goldin, an engineer at the U.S. Army Communications- Electronics Research, Development, and Engineering Center (CERDEC).


CERDEC’s solution to this challenge? Get SMART: Semantic Mediation for Army Reasoning and Teamwork.


The technology has clear potential to benefit warfighters, said 1LT Andrew Campbell of the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade, which experimented with SMART during a recent exercise. “This program allows our analysts to quickly and efficiently translate incom- ing reports into a retrievable database,” Campbell said. “Soldiers then spend more time organizing and analyzing data and less time retyping every new report. More time spent analyzing will directly lead to better results on the battlefield.”


The Interoperability Gap Current software tools—a mix of government-off-the-shelf, commercial- off-the-shelf, and homegrown applications—use different means to store and transmit information.


Today, military analysts charged with disseminating certain field reports can face a laborious, time-intensive process. To transfer data manually from one system to another, they not only must copy and paste, which is subject to human error, but also extensively reformat the data to match the input requirements of the second system. By automating pieces of that translation process according to users’ specifications, SMART frees the analysts to focus on other tasks.


While ideally all systems could be brought onto a single, standard data structure, that approach is time- and cost-prohibitive, CERDEC officials said. They cited a 2006 research paper published by Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute,


APRIL –JUNE 2011 45


This program allows our analysts to quickly and efficiently translate incoming reports into a retrievable database. Soldiers then spend more time organizing and analyzing data and less time retyping every new report.


“Ultra-Large Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future.” The report predicted that as DOD vigorously pursues information dominance, “systems will necessarily be decentralized in a variety of ways, developed and used by a wide variety of stakeholders with conflicting needs, evolving continuously, and constructed from heterogeneous parts.”


The report reinforced the notion that “one size does not fit all,” said Ron Szymanski, Chief Architect for Software and Technology for CERDEC’s Command and Control


Directorate (C2D). “Large systems are inherently heterogeneous, ever evolv- ing, and decentralized,” he said. “We should embrace and move to standards, but will probably never get there.”


If software systems could not be forced to speak the same “language,” the C2D team decided they could instead create a translator. However, the problem of enabling interoperability between dis- parate software systems is significantly more complex than translation from one software language to another; the C2D team needed a solution enabling complex mediation of data while


A Soldier monitors input from the tactical operations center during a test at White Sands Missile Range, NM. With the proliferation of systems that use different means to store and transfer information, interoperability has become a pressing concern. SMART allows systems to share more information faster to enhance collaboration, deconfliction, and integration. (U.S. Army photo.)


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