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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B2. Istanbul 2004
information that allied land component commanders need to
exchange (both vertically and horizontally). It serves as the
common interface specification for the exchange of essential
battle-space information. The function, implementation and the
display of the host C2 application is not the concern of MIP.
System developers incorporate the MIP specification and
include a single interface to it. The specification enables C2IS
to C2IS information exchange and allows users to decide what
information is exchanged, to whom it flows, when and over
what communications medium[4].
2.4 Command and Control Information System
Command and Control Information System can be summarized
as the concepts of; interoperability, coherent situational
awareness, planning and information management. In fact C2IS
has an inter discipliner construction. Namely, C2IS includes,
GIS, Management Information System, DBMS, Web
technologies, simulation systems together to form a complete
“Decision Support System”. All of these infrastructure helps to
decision mechanisms and provides them consultancy to make a
reliable decision under difficult conditions and in short period
of time. Time-critical on-demand information processing in
modern C2IS systems necessitates highly interconnected IT
components that facilitate a media-independent, semantically
homogeneous information flow among the various levels of and
organizations in the command-and-control hierarchy.
Furthermore, due to continually changing requirements, C2IS
systems must be extremely flexible with respect to both their
own internal structure and the services offered. For example, in
order to support multi-lateral operations, a C2IS system must be
adaptable to new (possibly evolving) command-and-control
hierarchies as well as to new IT services specially tailored for
specific operations. As a consequence, modern C2IS systems
need to be configurable ‘on the fly’ and enable — at least in
principle — unhindered information flow in the underlying
networks. These new challenges call for a novel design
paradigm: the focus is shifting from single applications toward
networks of cooperating information sources (network centric
computing).
Mobile
dewce
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Figure 1. Architecture of Distributed C2IS
The backbone of future C2IS systems will be a network of IT
Services distributed in the Intranet/Internet. Via the network, IT
Services can be located and accessed when needed. Meta
services (like yellow pages, search engines, data replication
daemons, etc.) help locating services and support the integration
of heterogeneous information sources. From the user's point of
view, each service must be simple and fault-tolerant, and the
distributed nature of the system must be transparent. As access
points, the user may employ a variety of computational devices,
ranging from hand-held devices like mobile phones and PDAs
to fully-fledged work-stations. In order to minimize
maintenance on the user side, the user interface should be as
generic as possible. For instance, one could imagine a standard
Web browser serving as user interface. In this way, updates and
extensions of the system are contained almost entirely to the
server side. Another important requirement on C2IS systems is
high availability. In a distributed environment this can be
achieved by means of redundancy (e.g. backup servers).
Nowadays, trend is the design and implementation of a flexible
core of a platform-independent, interoperable, network- centric
C2IS system which allows a fast and easy integration of
arbitrary IT components. In particular, architecture should be
opened to Web Services. To achieve this goal, component-
based distributed- object technologies like EJB, Java RMI, and
CORBA, and up-to-date Web technologies should be
deployed[2].
WebServices
Server
Session manager
SEN
Figure 2. An example system configuration of C2IS [2].
2.5 Future Technology of C2IS
A natural way to communicate is to use natural language. In the
research field of Human Language Technology (HLT) constant
progress is made. This progress also leads to applications in
practice. Examples are telephony systems with spoken input
(e.g. information of railway connections), recognition of spoken
language by dictation software or semi automatic machine
translation. The progress within the area of HLT makes it
possible to examine the usability of this technology in military
applications and to prove this in prototypical systems. Related
to Command and Control Information Systems (C2IS) the
following items are of interest:
e Recognition of speech to control a C2IS. This means, that
another input modality in addition to the keyboard and mouse is
available.
e Natural language access in spoken or written language to
C2IS databases.
e Recognition of speech and subsequent language processing
as a possibility to input data into the C2IS, e.g. the automatic
processing of the audit message of an observation post.
e Processing of spoken or written natural language input (e.g.
radio messages or transmission, web pages) for keyword
spotting or information extraction. This would deliver
information relevant for use in the C2IS.
Today, the usability of HLT is restricted to narrow and well
defined application areas (domains). Another requirement is
that the language must be restricted as well. This means, that
the vocabulary and the grammatical structures must be limited
enough such that processing time becomes acceptable. The
military domain and the stereotyped military command
language seem to be suitable for using HLT. From the different
possible uses of HLT in C2IS it was chosen during research
project NATLAC (Natural Language Access) the spoken access
