Subscribe to the Free Print Edition!
Celebrating 25 Years

GCN Home > 06/26/06 issue

Converged networks: You can’t use what you can’t find

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Moving voice, video and graphical data over a single IP network offers advantages in economy and manipulation. But using IP to move data is only half the job. You also must be able to find and access the data you need.

The Navy’s Joint Technical Data Integration program was created to solve this problem by providing a Web-based system to deliver technical, supply and maintenance information to aviation organizations.

The Naval Air Systems Command maintains a wealth of digital data, but using it was a challenge, especially if it was in a nontraditional form. How does a worker at an air station onboard a ship locate a digital video, or a particular part of a video, that has instructions for replacing the rotor of a specific model of helicopter?

“It is very difficult to access,” said NAVAIR’s JTDI program manager Paul Behrens. “From a fleet perspective they have to connect to multiple IT systems to access the information they needed. It was being accomplished, but not as efficiently as it could be.”

The common interface for accessing this data needed to include the capability to search legacy information across multiple formats and platforms. JTDI identified Coveo Enterprise Search from Coveo Solutions Inc. of Palo Alto, Calif., as a part of its baseline toolkit, pending approval for full-scale deployment.

Search plus audio mining

Coveo Enterprise Search is an internal search engine that integrates with network directories and access control functions to provide secure searches across an enterprise’s file systems, e-mail servers, intranets, Web sites, databases and applications. The most recent release, version 4.0, incorporates audio mining technology from Nuance Communications Inc. to search audio files and the audio tracks of video files. It also includes optical character recognition to identify relevant text in graphic images.

Coveo Enterprise Search has been beta tested by several naval aviation squadrons as part of the data integration program, Behrens said. “The product is meeting my expectations.”

JTDI began in 2000 as a demonstration by the Navy’s logistics commanders group. The challenge was to present technical data from a growing number of sources, in a growing number of formats, through an integrated environment.

“Initial demonstrations within the carrier air wings and shore air stations proved it was possible to create an integrated electronic technical, supply and maintenance data environment with COTS technology,” the Navy concluded.



GCN Popup