Automating Command Post and Battle Staff Operations at the USAF 45th Space Wing

Abstract

The DOD Net-Centric strategy seeks to insure that all data are visible, available, and useable when needed and where needed. Data visibility and usefulness are dependent on the development of systems and applications that are network enabled and have the capability to present information in a coherent manner. The current largely paper-driven procedures for installation command post and crisis management activities must give way to more automated processes that allow data to be automatically ingested from many sources available on the network. Moreover, data at the local level needs to be available on the network to other information consumers. Recently, the USAF 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base installed a low-cost solution for automating Command Post and Battle Staff operations. The system, named Shark command and control system (SCCS), is based on WebEOCreg, a commercial product created and marketed for emergency operations centers by ESi Inc. WebEOCreg was easily adapted to the role of daily command post operations and was already suitable for emergency/crisis management operations. The capabilities provided by WebEOCreg are significantly enhanced by the Knowledge Management Framework (KMF), which is based on BEA's AquaLogicreg Data Services Platform and Modus Operandi's Wavereg product. The KMF allows SCCS to display federated data from a wide variety of data sources, including relational databases and XML documents. The KMF provides a semantic layer on top of the federated data to allow queries to return information based on a domain model that includes classes and relationships between classes. This has allowed SCCS to display data from sources that were formerly "silos" of information. In turn, data accumulated in SCCS is made available to other information consumers via the KMF. This paper describes SCCS and KMF capabilities and looks forward to how command posts can be interconnected and access federated data