Capabilities > Decision Aids > Net-Centric Visualization of Command and Control Information Services (NIVS)

The Command and Control Enterprise Reference Architecture (C2ERA) provides a technical design pattern for the development of detailed architectural specifications and implementations and represents the Air Force’s ongoing transition to net-centricity. The software is comprised of three main elements: C2 nodes, the CII, and mission applications. A C2 node, used by the operational community as a major war fighting component, supports a specific war fighter community in a specific operational area by incorporating an IT implementation structure and the set of activities and functions required by the community to perform its tasks. The CII provides a set of enterprise computing services and capabilities to ensure interoperability across the enterprise and allow users to access decision-quality information in a timely manner. Mission applications perform an operational function by fusing services provided by the CII and other node information services (NIS). The C2ERA recommends that mission applications be as “thin” as possible, use standards-based communications between components, distribute data to a data tier as appropriate, and encapsulate business logic. The C2ERA identifies the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the method that should be used to couple services, which serve as the discrete building blocks by which to build functionality for the program. Additionally, services expose business functions through well defined interfaces that separate implementation from interface.

Visualization is an enterprise-wide requirement for mission applications for the US Air Force. Visualization improves the accuracy and speed of decision-making by enabling the efficient analysis of large quantities of data. The visualization pipeline is well understood and consists of the Select-Filter-Transform-Stylize-Render-Update capabilities. Ultra Electronics, ProLogic’s Service Oriented Visualization Framework (SOVF) will support diverse the visualization requirements of the net-centric environment of the future.

This project focuses on geospatial visualization, the most widely needed visualization domain, with a goal of maturing common visualization capabilities that may be applied to multiple C2 Communities of Interest. This framework will support various Communities of Interest (COIs) as future USAF systems seek to migrate legacy systems and approaches to the C2ERA architecture. Several recent and upcoming USAF acquisitions require that the systems be based on C2ERA and suggest the use of “visualization services” in the delivered systems and capabilities. However, these services have not been designed, described, or publicly documented. This project seeks to develop the framework for visualization within a service oriented architecture that can be adapted by COI. While the development of such a framework is unique, the research team is utilizing mature COTS technologies to develop reference implementations.