When Communities of Interest Collide: Harmonizing Vocabularies Across Operational Areas
Three recent trends have had a profound impact on data standardization within the
Department of Defense (DoD), and the ways DoD plans to create, implement, and manage
standardized data assets used for information exchange. These trends are the DoD's Net-Centric
vision, the adoption of the eXtended Markup Language (XML) family of specifications, and the
creation of the Communities of Interest (COIs). In this article, we give an overview of current
COI data integration processes, resultant issues and proposed solutions for determining and
documenting shared vocabularies. We also discuss potential uses of a software tool called
Harmony—freely available under a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to U.S. government
customers—that provides automated assistance for harmonizing terms across COIs, and a
proposed follow-on tool called Unity that is uniquely tailored to the needs of COI vocabulary
development.
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