Web services based on the C2IEDM - Data mediation and data storage

This paper shows how the ideas of web services and Model-Based Data Management (MBDM) are merged in two “C2IEDM Web Service” families realized by the VMASC team within the Battle Management Language (BML) group. Although being developed within the team for the prototype, the services can be used in other systems and projects easily, as they can be adapted and configured to serve alternative needs. To support unambiguous definition of data element for information exchange, the ideas of MBDM have been implemented, resulting in a data mediation service based on the use of the Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM) as a common reference model. Generally, data engineering includes four parts: data administration, data management, data alignment, and data transformation, of which data management, alignment, and transformation are of particular interest within the BML group. Applying MBDM, results are documented for data alignment using a commercial tool to map, aggregate, and disaggregate data, and remove/create duplicated data. This results in software products and configuration, that are directly used for data transformation: The commercial solution supports XSLT and Java-based mapping methods to set up transformation layers between both XML and database approaches. In BML, this is used to set up a C2IEDM based data mediation service speaking C2IEDM as well as the language to be mediated (in our case BML). The second service family contains C2IEDM based information exchange and storage services, which use the tag set of the coalition name space of the US DoD XML Repository to store, retrieve, and exchange information based on the C2IEDM. These services can be source and target of simple C2IEDM data replications. When combined with the C2IEDM based data mediation service, the C2IEDM based information exchange, and storage service can be used to store and exchange information of every mediated language. The two service families can be used in M&S infrastructures, such as Extensible M&S Framework (XMSF) prototypes, the Joint National Training Capability (JNTC), or the Distributed Continuous Experimentation Environment (DCEE), as well as in Global Information grid (GIG) infrastructures, hence, connecting both worlds effectively and efficiently.