Composable applications using service encapsulation (CAUSE)

Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) systems have the potential to operate in a net-centric environment in which tasking control, collected sensor data, and intelligence feeds can be made available via web services under a service oriented architecture. Rapid composition of ISR applications from such services would enable analysts and warfighters to quickly adapt to changing missions and ISR system availability. This paper describes a composition approach in which plug-ins that encapsulate service interactions are used to build applications. This encapsulation allows for heterogeneous service technologies to be used in an application. A composition Graphical User Interface (GUI) allows the user to discover needed service plug-ins, connect outputs to inputs between services, and generate a consolidated application GUI. Semantic descriptions of the plug-ins and their inputs and outputs facilitate consistency checks that ensure proper operation of the composed application. An initial implementation of such an application composition architecture was developed and demonstrated with simulated ISR assets and data feeds.