Moving towards a Lingua Franca for M&S and C3I - Developments concerning the C2IEDM

Under the umbrella of NATO, the ATCCIS Permanent Working Group developed the Army/Allied Tactical Command and Control Information System (ATCCIS) Data Model for a couple of years, establishing an unprecedented amount of international agreement on information exchange requirements on the battlefield. The model was recently established as the Allied Data Publication Standard No. 32 (AdatP-32) under the name “Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM).” As the concepts are not bound to land services, the name was changed to “Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (C2IEDM).” An alternative name used referring to the same model is “Generic Hub” or “Battlefield Generic Hub.” Due to its high level of maturity, this data model also became the data model of the Multilateral Interoperability Program (MIP), established by NATO to interconnect their C3I systems. Although various prototypes using the ATCCIS/C2IEDM data model to connect C3I and M&S systems have been presented to SISO in the recent past, the concept is approaching a new quality, as various projects and concepts are starting to adapt the ideas. Following some general concepts dealing with the challenges of correct linguistic information mapping, this paper will give a short history of the development and first prototypes and an overview on actual projects, in particular the Extensible Battle Management Language (XBML) project. Furthermore, it will extrapolate how – if the proposed route is followed – the ATCCIS/C2IEDM data model can become the backbone for a common ontology for military information exchange in coalitions of services, nations, and system families, such as C3I and M&S.