NATO and XML

Dr. Klaus Müller

NATO C3 Agency

The Hague

The Netherlands

muller@bart.nl

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Abstract

No abstract was provided for this paper.

Contents

Introduction
Potential XML application areas in NATO
Steps towards a NATO XML policy
Summary and conclusions

Introduction

This paper gives an overview of why NATO is interested in XML and how the organization is approaching its adoption.

NATO is an alliance of 19 nations. Political consultation between these nations is key to executing the Alliance's political missions, and command and control is essential for the military missions. Both these processes require extensive and constant information exchange inside NATO and between NATO and its member nations. Together, these processes are commonly called C3, for Consultation, Command and Control.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its members are using a large number of national and NATO-internal information systems, many of which are internetted. Interoperability between these systems is a constant concern.

What makes achieving and maintaining this interoperability a challenge is the fact that the systems in NATO and in the nations are being developed and procured independently from each other, i.e., there are no standards for hardware, software or system architecture which have been jointly adopted by NATO and its member countries.

For decades, though, information exchange requirements and military (proprietary) exchange formats have been agreed and codified. Unfortunately, the implementation of these formats has been too expensive to allow general introduction in all defense systems in NATO or its members. The required software had to be custom-built, exclusively for the military market.

The near-universal acceptance of XML for the creation of domain-specific information exchange formats has attracted the attention of information systems planners in NATO and its members. For the first time, there is the potential for making use of affordable Commercial Off The Shelf tools and system architectures to implement interoperability between NATO and national systems.

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Potential XML application areas in NATO

Military Message Formats (MTF)

Over the last few decades, a number of standards for electronic exchange of military information have been developed. Examples are NATO's AdatP-3 (Allied Data Publication No. 3), and the USMTF (United States Message Text Format). These standards prescribe the syntax and semantics of structured alphanumerical messages, most of which were originally designed for teletypewriters or TELEX. They encode the agreements on information exchange for everything from logistics to intelligence reports. They are key to interoperability between national and NATO systems.

Messages are made up of fields, sets (which are groups of fields) and segments (which in turn are groups of sets). A part of a typical message in e.g. AdatP-3 or USMTF looks like this:

 ...
OPSUP/ACTTYP:ASW//
AIROP/020200Z/6/IT/FTR/F16/TN:123/LM:4130N01000E/
CRS:160/SPD:700KPH/ALT:12000FT//
OPSUP/ACTTYP:DCA//
 ...

Engineers in the US and other NATO nations saw that this can easily be mapped into an XML encoding, such as:

<air_operations>
<day-time> 020200Z </day-time>
<quantity> 6 </quantity>
<country> IT </country>
<subject_type> FTR </subject_type>
<aircraft_type> F16 </aircraft_type>
<track_number> 123</track_number>
<course> 160 </course>
<speed unit="kph"> 700 </speed>
<altitude unit="feet"> 12000 </altitude>
...
</air_operations>

Such message formats in XML allow the use of very affordable Commercial Off The Shelf tools for generation and processing of messages. These tools can also offer new capabilities, e.g. for reporting, search and retrieval, which have been difficult or impossible to implement in traditional military message processing systems. Successful trials in the US have already demonstrated the great potential and affordability of XML-based message processing systems.

Backward compatibility (translation) between such an XML encoding and the original MTF can easily be provided with simple XSL stylesheets. This is important, as existing systems and new, XML-based message systems may have to coexist for a lengthy transition period.

Several NATO countries have already decided to work towards XML as an additional encoding of their existing MTFs. The intention at this moment is not to replace the original encoding.

Various efforts are currently under way in NATO to map the voluminous message text definitions into XML. An indication of the translation task for AdatP-3 is that the total size of its printed standard is almost 4000 pages! Fortunately, automatic translation is possible.

The US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has already stood up a registry for XML tags for messages and other data (http://diides.ncr.disa.mil/xmlreg/ ).

Some existing message processing products offered by industry have already been extended to XML syntax.

Markup of semi-structured documents

Another area where XML is of interest to NATO is the markup of semi-structured documents, i.e., in an "SGML lite" role. NATO is operating in an information-rich environment and has to avoid information overload for its staffs.

Much of the information coming into NATO or being generated in NATO is unstructured. Storing, retrieving and processing it efficiently requires metadata being attached to this information. Depending on nature and intended processing of documents, this may range from external, library-style descriptions of documents (author, content, etc.) to deep markup of the body of documents. To date, metadata is being stored in proprietary formats in e.g. document management systems or in SGML.

XML is being considered by researchers in NATO and several of its nations as a candidate for defining the encoding of the necessary metadata markup. This would also allow the seamless storage, retrieval and processing of XML-marked up documents from the civilian world, e.g. news marked up in languages such as XMLNews-Story or XMLNews-Meta.

Federation of heterogeneous databases

In addition to information exchange by structured messages, NATO and its members increasingly use database to database information exchange between their systems. As these databases often have different underlying data models, though, this creates interoperability problems which typically are solved by one-off solutions (mapping and translation) in the sending and receiving systems.

NATO engineers are currently studying the feasibility of overcoming these interoperability obstacles by federating heterogeneous databases, using data middleware implementing a common conceptual schema. All database exchanges in such system would be done by mapping to and from this conceptual schema. This approach avoids migration costs for existing (legacy) systems. Web-based data exchange and publishing in NATO's intranets could be done with XML-encoded documents derived from a common XML reference schema.

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Steps towards a NATO XML policy

With a large number of promising defense-oriented XML activities in NATO and its member countries and the explosive emergence of XML technology in operating systems, DBMS, information storage and retrieval systems, etc., the widespread use of XML in military systems seems to be a foregone conclusion.

While this adoption certainly promises powerful new defense system capabilities at affordable costs, it does nothing for inter-system interoperability in NATO. An uncoordinated development of military XML DTDs and tags would even lead to new interoperability problems between NATO and national defense systems. A NATO policy on XML adoption, based on coordination and agreements with the Alliance's member nations, could prevent this risk.

The NATO C3 Agency XML Workshop

To prepare the ground for a NATO XML policy, the NATO C3 Agency organized an XML Workshop in The Hague (Netherlands) in November 1999. The workshop programme was supported by NATO headquarters IT policy staffs and the US MITRE Corporation (heavily involved in US Department of Defense XML projects).

The NC3A XML Workshop had the following goals and focus:

Analysis of potential XML application areas in NATO,
Assessment of benefits (interoperability, cost savings, etc.) which the adoption of XML by NATO could bring,
To take stock of defense-related XML activities in NATO countries and NATO's commands, headquarters, agencies, NATO C3 Organization, and NATO Research and Technology Organization,
To gain insight into the momentum and processes of XML adoption in industry,
Development of recommendations for a way ahead for NATO regarding XML (bodies to be involved, exploratory prototyping or pilot applications, participation in the international XML standardization effort, etc.).

The workshop was attended by senior IT staff from the defence community in NATO and its member nations. Invited world-class experts from the software industry, the W3C and OASIS contributed papers.

The workshop proceedings have been published at http://www.nc3a.nato.int/symposia/xmlworkshop/.

Policy recommendations from Workshop

In its final session, the workshop compiled its findings and developed policy proposals for NATO. In summary, they are as follows:

Overall conclusions:

XML is an important family of new technologies which warrant the attention of NATO and the Nations, and which should be applied in a controlled manner. Additional steps should be taken in the short term to ensure that the potential long-term benefits offered by the introduction of XML, including - but not limited to - improved interoperability, are achieved.

Way ahead recommendations:

Steps should be taken to broaden the community and depth of XML exposure in NATO, such as information dissemination, demonstrations and pilot applications. Rationale: There is a requirement to give NATO communities (policy makers, system planners, users communities, ...) insight into the potential and benefits of XML technology insertion.

Steps should be taken to consider the impact on NATO and national bodies of XML technology insertion on data management. Rationale: XML insertion into NATO and/or national defense systems will have potential far-reaching consequences on system structures, business processes and data exchange.

The establishment of a NATO XML Registry and Repository Service should be initiated by the NATO Data Administration Office to maximise the coordination of XML-related activities with other NATO data management activities in the broadest context. Rationale: It is necessary to link XML tag and schema development with broader NATO data management and data modeling activity; to avoid uncoordinated schema development in NATO which would exacerbate the risk of interoperability problems and duplication of effort; to identify, and link to, applicable defense or open tag and schema registries and repositories.

Under the mandate of the NATO C3 Board (the highest IT policy body in NATO), a designated NATO body should participate actively in organisations such as World Wide Web Consortium and OASIS. Rationale: There is a need to bring a validated and coordinated NATO defense community view on unsatisfied military requirements into the XML standards evolution process, with a view to influencing that process to support those requirements. Also, early insight into the direction of XML evolution is essential.

Policy status

The recommendations have been formally submitted to the appropriate IT policy bodies in the NATO C3 Organization. They are currently being reviewed and coordinated with all NATO communities involved in and potentially affected by a NATO XML policy.

In parallel, the NATO C3 Agency continues its analytical and laboratory XML work on technology evaluation and identification of potential NATO defense applications. It fosters information exchange on national XML defence research/development and policies. The Agency is also the first and so far only NATO body which is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium.

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Summary and conclusions

NATO is well positioned for the adoption of XML. For decades, the Alliance has analyzed and documented its information exchange requirements in great detail. Structured message text semantics and formats implementing those requirements were agreed a long time ago and are in use. NATO has an ongoing corporate data modeling effort by a capable data administration organization. This provides an excellent data model to which all XML tags and DTDs must comply and refer. It also has an emerging high level architecture in which the place and role of XML could be clearly identified. What XML can contribute are modern encodings of the NATO defense information exchange semantics and the benefits of strong software industry XML support to e.g. e-commerce. XML can give NATO's defence systems better interoperability and greater capabilities at lower costs.

NATO realizes, though, that the XML technology and standards have not been developed specifically for defense applications. It did not foresee the potential of Web technology such as HTML for defence systems and now has to live with standards completely defined to civilian standards. With XML, it still seems possible to influence its further development to include essential defence requirements. These may even serve other communities which have similar needs. The Alliance therefore intends to participate in the further evolution of these standards and will communicate its special requirements to bodies such as the World Wide Web Consortium.

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