Data exchange for shared situation awareness

The Command and Control (C2) system that provide information to the actors in a conflict has always been a key target for technology advancement. The ongoing development of automated digital military information systems has enabled, and is demanding the development of specific functional area support systems. The focus of communication systems and methods is shifting away from human to human communication towards human to machine and machine to machine communication. Along with this change have come proliferation of operating systems, data representation schemata, data exchange methods and other aspects that now confront us with a “confusion of languages” [1]. The paper describes the information exchange issues and challenges involved in creating shared situation awareness in the described systems. Some existing models for both information representation and exchange are described and a proactive communication model for information exchange in a distributed system is presented. The proactive communication model caters for the data requirements of the data consumers, the objective being to provide the information required for forming good situational awareness of the data consumer. The proactive communication model relies on a middleware [5] that is able to acquire the information required by the consumer and to cater for the restrictions set by the data consumer on the requested data. The paper describes the middleware and how it can be applied in the above-described systems.