AIMS taking on roles to support tactical information dominance
Philip Joseph Ceccio, Robert G. Hillman · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2007
Military solutions to enable information sharing are being developed that will fundamentally change future concepts of operation. The development of sophisticated approaches to managing this information is a key element to reliably disseminate valued information to the tactical edge. This paper will describe the merging of two such systems to support these tactical edge users; the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Joint Battlespace Infosphere Reference Implementation (JBI/RI) and the Northrop Grumman Advanced Information Architecture (AIATM). The newly formed system is called the Advanced Information Management System (AIMS). The resulting technology, rooted in a service oriented approach, provides a managed information dissemination approach through the use of publish, subscribe, and query services. Information can be collected and shared among Communities of Interest (COI) without specific involvement from the tactical users. Persistence (via archiving to repositories), is a new capability added to the existing AIATM. Extreme care is taken to effectively manage the information within this dynamic environment. For example, Information resulting from queries and subscriptions is cached to mitigate potential bandwidth challenges at critical location within the system. AIMS improves security by allowing the establishment of roles for retrieval/publishing of information. The access to information is controlled not only at the message level but also by specified elements within the metadata tags. Lastly, the fortification of AIMS with Web Services allows for a highly cohesive loosely coupled design. AIMS utilizes of a Universal Description, Definition, and Integration (UDDI)[2] registry to describe and register services within the architecture. The UDDI allows implementations outside of AIMS (3rd party) to invoke any of the registered services for use within their own applications.