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GCN Home > 02/07/05 issue

The promise of XML

By Joab Jackson, GCN Staff

Agencies make headway on tagging data but still need description tools

For the Navy, the Extensible Mark- up Language provided a possible way to meet its FORCEnet objectives. FORCEnet is the Navy’s forward-looking architectural framework that intertwines sensors, command and control software, platforms and weapons into a common network.

Information sharing is nothing new. But while sharing data via the Web on a point-to-point basis has long been established, the challenge for the Navy—and other agencies—is designing systems that can share data on the fly, on an ad hoc basis. An application has to make its data available for numerous other applications—even those not foreseen by developers.

That is the promise of XML. In December 2003, the Office of Na- val Research piloted the Joint Expeditionary Warfare Logistics System (JEWLS), a decision-support system that uses Web services to provide logistics information to command and control applications.

A light protocol

“Ten years ago, we probably would have used a CORBA-based solution,” said Adam Sandman, a senior manager of technology for Sapient Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., which has worked with the Navy on the project. Sandman was referring to the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, an older method of sharing software functions across a network.

The problem with CORBA is that it does not work well in battlefield environments, Sandman said. It requires too much configuration and gobbles too many computer resources.

“CORBA is a very heavy protocol. It is very chatty. XML is a light protocol,” Sandman said. “With something like CORBA, the technology in the programming of the system was coupled with how it was communicated over the network. XML decouples the systems aspect of the communications format. If some data gets lost it doesn’t impact the remainder of the transaction.”

As a pilot, JEWLS has been tremendously successful; about a dozen Marine Corps and Navy units have used it. It touches eight Corps systems and 14 Navy systems. It was used in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, as well as in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

More news on related topics: Content / Record Management, Defense IT, Enterprise Architecture, Web Strategies



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