Mine Warfare (MIW) Community of Interest (COI) efforts towards the development of future data standards to enable a net-centric capability

The U.S. Navy established the Mine Warfare (MIW) Community of Interest (COI) in 2007 to develop data strategies in support of a future information-based architecture for naval MIW. The MIW COI is actively pursuing standard data exchange as a mechanism to facilitate the creation of a future service oriented architecture (SOA) and improved interoperability within the MIW system-of-systems. Initiatives include publishing data standards to facilitate implementation of open architecture (OA) and net-centric approaches as well as the development of a Data Standards Guidebook to facilitate the generation of future standards. During the past year, the COI published the data standard for MIW Contacts and prepared a foundational structure and schema for a MIW sensor data format using the hierarchical data format (HDF) specification as a common approach to managing unstructured sensor data in support of post mission analysis (PMA). Looking forward, the COI is implementing a data model roadmap to manage the data standards generation process for MTW-relevant tactical, meteorological and environment data, and sensor data. The development of data standards directly enables technology insertion by providing inputs to algorithms and modules. The use of a standard format also reduces integration costs and risk through early communication of available data and associated metadata. The access to common data standards allows new technologies to be more easily analyzed and incorporated during the verification and validation (V&V) process. An agile approach to technology insertion, enabled by common data standards, will ultimately result in an improved future MIW capability.