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NCOIC Geospatial Interoperability Task Team Presentation

Dr. Brand NiemannDirector and Senior Enterprise Architect – Data Scientist

Semantic Communityhttp://semanticommunity.info/

AOL Government Bloggerhttp://gov.aol.com/bloggers/brand-niemann/

March 9 and 12, 2012

It is not just where you put your data (cloud), but how you put it there!

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Recent Activities• SCOPE:

– NCOIC-NGA Demo• Director Long’s Questions and Answers - Five• Apps That Address Those Questions and Answers – Done Several!

– Federation of SOAs (and ESBs)• First Meeting of the NCOIC Federated SOA WG and Gen D'hollander's Activity Proposal • Possible SCOPE Workshop with NATO C3 to Understand Requirements for Federation

of SOAs

• Apps:– NATO Disaster Relief Use Cases

• Knowledgebase• Case Management

– RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service, Budapest, Hungary• Knowledgebase• Case Management

Credit to Roger Bernhardt (Boeing): For making me aware of the great RSOE EDIS resource. RSOE EDIS is a Federated SOA (of Web Services, RSS Feeds, etc.)!

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Roger Bernhardt (Boeing)• I believe that I would like to consider the use of Case Management to perform the OIA. A high

level case would be created for the disaster plan. The actual adaptations of the plan to the disaster as it’s scope and scale are revealed would populate sub-cases, allowing a Response Manager to “game” the response as needed as things evolve, allowing them to see where decisions might go awry as things like transportation system constraints bring themselves to bear on the situation.– Sound good!

• A question becomes, will your offering make available the tools needed to do this or am I obliged to subcontract to achieve this? Implementation can be done by you in the form of requested capabilities, maybe?– Yes and Yes.

• I talked with Supriya today and he sounds on board with the loose coalition where he would work the medical data primarily, medical services and impact assessment in that order of priority.– I would like to see his medical data.

• I wonder if we should identify a Wiki or Sharepoint section for collaboration on the NCOIC site. Is that possible?– I would ask Tim Thomas. I have my own Wiki that I use.

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GEOINT VISIONARY: Strengthening Analysis and Making Content More Accessible

• Selected Excerpts:– Q: In your recent remarks to the GEOINT 2011 Symposium, you addressed what had

happened in the year since you outlined your vision of “Putting the Power of GEOINT in your hands.” How would you sum up your conclusions on what you have seen so far?• A: Taken together, the strategic initiatives will ensure our content is discoverable and accessible

through an open IT environment, allowing GEOINT users—inside and outside of NGA—to operate in a self-, assisted- and full-service environment and enabling analysts to do deeper and richer analysis.

– Q: Your address devoted a considerable amount of time to demonstrating some of the new mobile apps being developed by NGA. How would you characterize progress in that area?• A: This is an area that has a great deal of growth potential. We’ve had great initial success with

our application in support of the homeland security/domestic disaster support mission, sometimes building them on the fly in response to our analysts observing operations in the field. In addition, in support of our safety of navigation mission, we are delivering a mobile device-enabled set of air navigation aids, helping to streamline our processes, get updated information to the user faster and reduce paper product generation.

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GEOINT VISIONARY: Strengthening Analysis and Making Content More Accessible

• Selected Excerpts:– Q: Your 2010 vision also included a call for deepening analytic expertise. What do

you see as the key accomplishments and challenges in that area?• A: Building and deepening analytic expertise is a top priority. A key goal of the vision is to

provide an analytic environment where analysts spend their time doing analysis and not waste their time looking for data, or building spreadsheets, or signing onto multiple systems.

– Q: What do you see as NGA’s greatest challenges?• NGA’s traditional order-entry processes and supply chain model are outdated, and we are

working to adapt our role from a legacy producer of product to a broader role as a GEOINT service and application provider that enables end-users to configure GEOINT according to the needs of specific users, particularly in the expanding mission areas of homeland security and disaster relief.

– Q: What do you see as the agency’s most significant steps in the past year in using commercial imagery, and where do you see that going in the future?• These new products provide the U.S. government and our coalition partners a high quality

current image foundation built to Open Geospatial Consortium standards and available via web services.

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Federation of SOAs (and ESBs)

• First Meeting of the NCOIC Federated SOA WG and Gen D'hollander's Activity Proposal– See next slide.

• Possible SCOPE Workshop with NATO C3 to Understand Requirements for Federation of SOAs– Discussed at SCOPE Meeting this week.

• 13th SOA for Government Conference, April 3rd – See My Blog and Earlier Best Practice by Arun

Majumdar (Cutter Consortium/VivoMind Intelligence)

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Key Points(from Gen. D’hollander’s Letter)

• Future NATO operations will require all coalition partners to have plug and play interoperable C4ISR Capabilities.

• NATO and the Nations are realizing the NNEC Vision by implementing their C4ISR Capabilities with a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach.

• At the centre of the architectural framework are the Core Enterprise Services (CES). These are commonly available in Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) offerings by Industry.

• There is no common definition in Industry of what services an ESB provides.

• There is no common agreement in Industry on what interoperability standards an ESB should support.

• There is no common agreement in Industry of what architectural patterns a Federated ESB implementation should support.

Source: Martin Schmidt Slides and Paper for NCOIC Plenary EC/AC, March 1st, 2012.

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13th SOA for Government Conference, April 3rd

• Federal SOA CoP Using All These Options:– Replace all the Proprietary ESB’s with an Open Source One

(e.g., Progressive Software at the FAA)– Use an Open Source ESB to Federate All the Proprietary

ESBs or Open Source ESBs (MITRE SOA Lab)– Develop Shared Services (SOA) (Federal CIO Council)– Use a Systems of Systems Approach to Federate Content

with a WOA Platform & Case Management (Current Pilot)– Free the Data and Use “Cloud Layers” (Current Pilot)– Use Ontology for Federation and Integration of Systems

(Past Best Practice and Next Pilot)

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Key Goals of Federal Shared Service Plan (Looks Like SOA)

• Standardization: “Shared service providers must leverage consistent standards that streamline functions across the Federal Government. This enables communication, data sharing and function use across all agencies. It eliminates the use of decentralized and inconsistent resources to create new, unique solutions throughout agencies in response to a single set of Federal requirements.

• Visibility: “A government-wide shared services catalog helps agencies discover the wide array of available services. This enhances the potential for service integration as some agencies will develop shared services for those functions not already being provided.

• Reusability: “Shared services harness a way to support duplicated agency functions throughout the mission areas. This reduces the potential for development and maintenance costs by using repeatable services.”

• Platform independence: “Agencies no longer need to worry about integrating with their current platforms in-house. Shared services providers ensure a stable infrastructure and can manage systems changes and updates within a controlled environment.”

• Extensibility: “The basic shared services of a provider can be used as building blocks for other services that consumer agencies need. Services can be scaled up or down, based on demand.”

• Location transparency: “Users of shared services access the services from anywhere within the shared service network. This increases availability and end user access to strengthen SLAs between the provider and the services consumer.”

• Reliability: “Services provided are robust and stable with service continuity capabilities to minimize critical system outages to levels established by SLAs.”

• My Note: Shared services could be replaced with SOA in every one of those 7 points – while the word shared may be more appealing from the political and cost savings point of view, the reality from our experience is that initially good architecture and more investment are need to make it work and the new plan does not really provide for that and leaves the impression that it is easy to do if someone would just do it, but it takes real work like we have been doing over the past 6 years or so. So our agenda for the 13th conference features the real practitioners.

http://semanticommunity.info/Federal_SOA/13th_SOA_for_E-Government_Conference_April_3_2012#Comment_1_from_Reader

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Use a Systems of Systems Approach to Federate Content with a WOA Platform & Case Management

http://www.mindtouch.com/blog/tag/woa/

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Use a Systems of Systems Approach to Federate Content with a WOA Platform & Case Management

SSemantic Index ofLinked Data (e.g. Excel)

Dynamic Case Management (e.g. Be Informed)

Data Science Library (e.g. Spotfire)

Data Science Products (e.g. Spotfire)

Our Mantra is: Data Science Precedes the Use of SOA, Cloud, and Semantic Technologies!Our Mission is like Googles: Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.Our Method is like Be Informed 4: Architectural Diagrams and Questions and Answers are not enough, you need Dynamic Case Management!Our Purpose: To "ground" the NCOIC-NGA Pilot in the NCOIC Deliverables by building a database of those deliverables that is displayed and used in a Dashboard.

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“Cloud Layers”• Software-as-a-Service (SWaaS):

– NIST: The consumer is free of any worries and hassles related to the service. • Example: Salesforce

• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS):– NIST: Develops, tests, deploys and manages applications hosted in a cloud environment.

• Example: Azure

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):– NIST: Virtual computers, cloud storage, network infrastructure components such as firewalls

and configuration services.• Example: Amazon

• Security-as-a-Service (SCaaS):– Gus Hunt, CIA CTO, March 6, 2012.

• Example: SonicWall

• Data-as-a-Service (DaaS):– Gus Hunt, CIA CTO, March 6, 2012.

• Example: Cloudera

Sources: http://www.techno-pulse.com/2011/06/cloud-service-models-saas-paas-iaas.html andhttp://semanticommunity.info/AOL_Government/Intelligence_Community_Loves_Big_Data

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Ontology for Federation and Integration of Systems

• Cory Casanave: What are the special capabilities ontologies have to offer for federation and integration that are not served by more traditional federation and integrations approaches such as ETL, SOA, Event Systems, etc?

• Eric Little: They often work in conjunction. I currently have a client in the medical device industry, for whom we have built a very large semantic integration system which runs in a private cloud computing system at their facility. In short it is not like one should ever conceive of having an ontology do all of those things. The semantics provide the common vocabulary and set of integrated models, the logics/reasoner run over them in the form of queries, rules, autoclassifications, etc., the cloud provides the hardware, provisioning and computational horsepower to perform functions over large data graphs, the SOA layers provide means to move information to other technologies within the cloud, etc.

• Kate Goodier: I also find that in applying ontology and semantics to solving federation issues, the solution always involves a combined approach.

• My Note: See complete discussion at URL below.http://semanticommunity.info/Federal_SOA/13th_SOA_for_E-Government_Conference_April_3_2012#Discussion_That_Prompted_Me_To_Invite_Eric_Little_and_Kate_Goodier_to_Present_at_Our_Fall_Conference

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How Would I Build a New App?

• Goal: NATO Disaster Relief Use Cases• Activities:– Use Previous NATO Disaster Response

Knowledgebase– Build Knowledgebase of NATO Disaster Response

Operations– Federate the Distributed Knowledgebases for

Analytics and Semantics

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Use Previous NATO Disaster Response Knowledgebase

Web Player

The NGIA and NATO have questions about responding to new disasters, so they consult their knowledgbases of unstructured, structured, and complex data that have been provisioned, integrated, and visualized in this app.The question is how have we responded to previous disasters?

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Build Knowledgebase ofNATO Disaster Response Operations

http://semanticommunity.info/A_Quint-Cross_Information_Sharing_and_Integration/NATO_Disaster_Response/Operations

Note: This WOA Platform Supports theNew Sitemap and Schema Protocols.

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Knowledgebase Indicesin a Spreadsheet

http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/17448/=NATO.xlsx

Note: Only 7 maps See next slide.

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15.8. Helping Ukrainecope with flooding

http://semanticommunity.info/A_Quint-Cross_Information_Sharing_and_Integration/NATO_Disaster_Response/Operations#Maps_2

Question: What kind of maps wouldNGA provide for this disaster?

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Some Next Steps

• Options:– Semantic Insights Research Assistant (SIRA):

• Convert all the PDF files to text for use Web Browser search and in SIRA to build simple reports and actual ontologies.

• Use all the PDF files as attachments for the SIRA Corpus to build simple reports and actual ontologies.– Spreadsheet:

• Knowledgebase indices directly to a spreadsheet DONE• Add additional columns for multiple documents and location (country and city) DONE• Show facets for Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential

– Basemaps:• Boundary (Shape), Image (Google), and NATO (Various Sub-country) DONE

– Analytics:• Copy Europe Life Expectancy Tab and Replace Data Set with NATO Disaster Relief Operations Data Set.

DONE– Case Management:

• Use Be Informed’s Four Metamodels* (Case Management, Products and Decisions, Interaction, and Registration*)

• Federate Across NGA, NCOIC, DoD, VA, FAA, etc. Metamodels

* http://semanticommunity.info/A_Quint-Cross_Information_Sharing_and_Integration/2010_Haiti_Earthquake_Metamodel

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NATO Disaster ResponseOperations Dashboard

Web Player

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Design Principles of Federal Shared Services Strategy

• Benefits:– Standardization

• Uses Sitemap and Schema Protocols and a Web Oriented Architecture

– Visibility• Puts GEOINT in hands of users

– Reusability• Reuses content provides reusable

content– Platform Independence

• Exports standard data formats– Extensibility

• Amazon Cloud is elastic– Location Transparency

• Amazon Cloud with SLAs– Reliability

• Amazon Cloud with SLAs

• Components:– 1 Requirements

• Director Long’s statements– 2 Workflow

• Steps for Building An App– 3 Data Exchange

• Federate with WOA and Dynamic Case Management

– 4 Applications• More functionality and data

exchange than current systems– 5 Hosting

• Amazon Cloud’s SLAs– 6 Security and Privacy

• Amazon Cloud’s SLAsGoal: Built Shared Services App That Meets or Exceeds These Benefits and Components

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How Would I Build a New App?

• Goal: RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service, Budapest, Hungary

• Activities:– Inventory Assets*– Build Knowledgebases of Global Disaster Response

Operations– Federate the Distributed Knowledgebases for

Analytics and Semantics

* Note: Waiting to see if actual data sets are available.

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RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service, Budapest, Hungary

• The Hungarian National Association of Radio Distress-Signalling and Infocommunications (RSOE) operates Emergency and Disaster Information Service (EDIS) within the frame of its own website which has the objective to monitor and document all the events on the Earth which may cause disaster or emergency. Our service is using the speed and the data spectrum of the internet to gather information. We are monitoring and processing several foreign organisation's data to get quick and certified information.

• The EDIS website operated together by the General-Directorate of National Disaster Management (OKF) and RSOE, in co-operation with the Crisis Management Centre of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, provides useful information regarding emergency situations and their prevention. Extraordinary events happening in Hungary, Europe and other areas of the World are being monitored in 24 hours per day. All events processed by RSOE EDIS are displayed near real time - for the sake of international compatibility - according to the CAP protocol on a secure website (https://hisz.rsoe.hu). To ensure clear transparency all events are categorized separately in the RSS, XML, CAP directory (e.g. earthquake, fire, flood, landslide, nuclear event, tornado, vulcano). RSOE EDIS also contributes in dissemination of the CAP protocol in Hungary.

• Beside the official information, with the help of special programs nearly 9-1000 internet press publications will be monitored and the publication containing predefined keywords will be processed. However, these "news" cannot be considered as official and reliable information, but many times we have learnt critical information from the internet press. We are screening the incoming information and storing in a central database sorted by category.

• Prepared Citizens – Prepared Communities

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/read/index.php?pageid=about_index

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RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service, Budapest, Hungary

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RSOE Emergency and Disaster Information Service, Budapest, Hungary

• Current Emergencies• Short Time Events• Long Time or Rolling Event(s)• Mass Death of Animals• Tsunami Information• Earthquake (s)• Volcano Activity Report (Last 30 days)• Active Tropical Storm System (s)• Supervolcanoes Monitoring System• Earth Approaching Object (objects that are Known in the next 30

days)

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Current Emergencies and Short Time Events

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index2.php?area=eu

Links: See Next Slides

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Earthquake: Valle Orsara, Italy

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/read/index.php?pageid=seism_read&rid=233008

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Earthquake: Valle Orsara, Italy

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/read/index.php?pageid=seism_read&rid=233008

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Epidemic Hazard: State of Maryland

http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/site/?pageid=event_summary&edis_id=EH-20120307-34428-USA

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Long Time or Rolling Event(s),Mass Death of Animals, and Tsunami Information

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Earthquake (s)

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Volcano Activity Report (Last 30 days)

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Active Tropical Storm System (s) andSupervolcanoes Monitoring System

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Earth Approaching Object (objects that are Known in the next 30 days)

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Excerpts from OntoApp Intro Session K March 8, 2011

• NCOIC Outbrief on Plenary and Update on New Activities by Carl Schwab, NCOIC Executive Director, March 9th:– Mobile Apps needed ASAP was a recurring theme.

Rob Kruse, FacetApp is offering training on developing Semantic Enterprise Apps, at a special price for NCOIC members. For details contact Rob at rkruse@facetapp.com.

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Solution Strategy

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OntoApp App Platform

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Build Semantic Enterprise Apps Faster

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Inference Engine Landscape

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Deliver Powerful Apps Faster

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OntoApp Intro Session K

What does the green mean?

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OntoApp Intro Session K

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Acord

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Acord

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Acord

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Acord

http://www.progress.com/en/Product-Capabilities/semantic-integration.html

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OntoApp Intro Session K

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SURF Incubator