Navy releases plan to integrate maritime systems

The Navy released a blueprint on Nov. 24 for how federal, state and municipal agencies can share enormous amounts of maritime information that affect security, the economy, climate, transportation and other areas to create an integrated picture of activity on the seas.

According to the Management Architecture Hub Strategy, developed by Navy Chief Information Officer Rob Carey, at least 20 federal agencies along with state and local governments will exchange a staggering amount of information needed to meet the goals of the national maritime domain awareness strategy. First released by the Bush administration in 2005, the strategy called for an "effective understanding of anything associated with the maritime domain which could impact the security, safety, economy or environment of the United States."

The information spans across large government programs, ranging from oceanographic data on the past, current and future state of oceans and coasts gathered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through its Integrated Ocean Observing System, to the movement of ships and people collected by the Navy in its Global Command and Control-Maritime system. The Navy's network tracks the routes of 100,000 vessels, people and cargo containers, according to Christopher Miller, Navy program executive officer for command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, who spoke at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's MILCOM conference in San Diego last week.

The hub strategy is part of a larger program called the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness. That plan also calls for the government to integrate manifest information on vessel cargo into a system of systems, and envisions collecting and integrating data to manage information ranging from weather data to intelligence.

The hub strategy plan envisions an information sharing environment in which "data from disparate sources will be discoverable, accessible, understandable, fused and with appropriate information assurance to enable user-defined and common operational pictures."

A major obstacle to fusing all this information to create an overall picture of what is occurring on and in the oceans and seas is the fact that the networks were developed in isolation and cannot easily exchange information. To share data, the government will have to develop standards, the plan said.

Information sharing among federal agencies and state and local governments also will require development of a business model, including a federated approach for core services such as metadata registries. Rather than develop a Maritime Domain Awareness metadata registry, the hub plan calls for governments to created a federation of metadata registries that agencies use, which will allow direct exchange of information.

Existing maritime systems exchange information on a point-to-point basis and the hub architecture calls for a shift to a "many to many" exchange of information, the hub plan said. That will require development of data standards that will ensure the "right data is available in the right place at the right time."