XML-BASED INTEROPERABILITY IN THE INTEGRATED SHIPBUILDING ENVIRONMENT (ISE)

Interoperability is one of the major challenges facing the U.S. shipbuilding industry today, and the new WWW technologies (in particular, XML) offer the opportunity for revolutionary improvements in this area. XML is being used within the Integrated Shipbuilding Environment (ISE) to achieve interoperability of shipbuilding systems technologies through the interchange of shipbuilding product information. The ISE project is a multi-shipyard project funded by the Maritech-Advanced Shipbuilding Enterprise (ASE) program. ISE has developed a reference architecture for systems technologies in the U.S. shipbuilding industry, and it has applied this reference architecture to the solution of the primary interoperability business drivers in the industry today. The ISE has identified both functional requirements and technical requirements for maritime product information sharing. This paper describes the ISE approach for using XML to accomplish application-to-application (A2A) interoperability for the shipbuilding industry.