Three recent trends have had a profound impact on data standardization within the Department of Defense (DoD), and the ways DoD plans to create, implement, and manage standardized data assets used for information exchange.
When Communities of Interest Collide: Harmonizing Vocabularies Across Operational Areas
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Three recent trends have had a profound impact on data standardization within the Department of Defense (DoD), and the ways DoD plans to create, implement, and manage standardized data assets used for information exchange. These trends are the DoD's Net-Centric vision, the adoption of the eXtended Markup Language (XML) family of specifications, and the creation of the Communities of Interest (COIs). In this article, we give an overview of current COI data integration processes, resultant issues and proposed solutions for determining and documenting shared vocabularies. We also discuss potential uses of a software tool called Harmony—freely available under a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to U.S. government customers—that provides automated assistance for harmonizing terms across COIs, and a proposed follow-on tool called Unity that is uniquely tailored to the needs of COI vocabulary development.