USING SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGIES TO COMPOSE LIVE VIRTUAL CONSTRUCTIVE (LVC) SYSTEMS

Department of Defense (DoD) closed architectures and proprietary solutions limit ability to provide gaming, semantic reasoning and social networking capabilities employed by industry and available in the open source community. Exorbitant sustainment costs of legacy solutions are unjustifiable and inhibit transition to enhanced LVC solutions. Furthermore, legacy solutions are dependent on an aging workforce of static-centric modelling & simulation (M&S) subject matter expertise (SME) to promote reuse, while budget cuts increase attrition among junior-level technical staff. This paper describes challenges and recommendations for changing the DoD M&S training paradigm to facilitate interoperability, incorporate emerging semantic web technologies, and provide a knowledge base to promote reuse. Two ongoing R&D projects will illustrate innovative strategies and their potential to alleviate legacy system interoperability issues while transitioning to a LVC Defense Training Environment (DTE) where US and Coalition Command and Control (C2) and M&S systems seamlessly interoperate to train as we fight.