New maritime domain awareness plan calls for cloud computing and info sharing

An updated plan released by the White House in late December for achieving maritime domain awareness is heavy on the calls for information sharing.

The plan merges two previously separate plans published in 2005--the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness and the Global Maritime Intelligence Integration Plan.

The merger "highlights the inextricable relationship between MDA and maritime intelligence integration," it states.

Although light on specifics, as federal strategic plans typically are, the new plan calls for organizations involved in monitoring the maritime domain to transition from "organization-centric databases to web-centric enterprise services that retrieve data from multiple sources (e.g. clouds, databases)."

It also calls for data to conform to recognized standards, naming the National Information Exchange Model as an example. NIEM is a set of standardized XML schemas built on a core of commonly defined data components, and is used as a data exchange method by federal, state and local governments; the Defense Department officially adopted it in March, favoring it over UCore. Managed by the Homeland Security Department, the NIEM community of interest released in October the third version of NIEM.

NIEM is also utilized by the Information Sharing Environment program office within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence--and calls for working with the intelligence community also figure prominnelty in the plan. "Advancing maritime intelligence integration relies heavily upon effective collaboration among the members of the IC," it says.

The plan is set to be updated no more than five years from now. In the meantime, it calls for accomplishing four objectives:

• Organize stakeholders through governance;
• continue to mitigate MDA challenges;
• improve domain awareness through enterprise-level access to data; and,
• enhance collaboration through outreach.

For more:
- download the National Maritime Domain Awareness Plan for the National Strategy for Maritime Security (.pdf)

Related Articles:
Coast Guard adopts Ozone Widget Framework
Coast Guard drops satellite AIS tracking acquisition
DoD adopts NIEM, will no longer support UCore development