This is the second edition of the MTR originally titled "Principles of Interoperability and
Integrations", now publicly re-released as: "Principles of Interoperability and Integration, Volume 1: Fundamentals".
As work progressed after the original release, Net-Centric Conversations (NCC) was greatly
expanded upon. In addition, Nodes combined with Discovery Scopes to become Sub-Enterprises.
These two topics are the basis of "Principles of Interoperability and Integration, Volume 2: Net
Centric Conversations and Sub-Enterprises". This new 2nd MTR will be published early Fall 2006,
and will also be publicly released.
The promise of net-centric warfare is based on the assumption that services (especially web
services) can freely converse amongst themselves, and exchange data via messages. The reality is
that this is a hard problem, due in no small part to the realities of how we organize services to run
within Nodes. In addition, DISA NCES efforts have encouraged us to view the world through
nine service types, and much of the discussion has been stove-piped, focusing on one service type
at a time.
This paper brings together net-centric elements of messaging, discovery and security and
examines the minimum coordination to achieve a net-centric conversation between services. This
coordination becomes the limiting factor in how quickly we can create, update, or delete a netcentric
conversation. In fact we can define an agility metric for the enterprise as: "the highest
sustainable rate of creating, updating, and deleting net-centric conversations". An example can be
Weather service. If your organization wants to use it (their web service) do you expect to be able
to make this connection within months? Weeks? How about minutes or hours? That is what we
need to strive for to meet an agile, small adversary.
» Download Paper [PDF, 2.4MB]
