A multilevel approach to interoperability in surveillance and reconnaissance

In the domain of civil and military surveillance and reconnaissance sensors and exploitation systems of different producers are used to achieve an overall picture of a critical situation. In today's multinational cooperation's on security and peace keeping it is essential to be able to share data that is produced by one national asset with other systems or even other nations. Therefore interoperability has to be established between those various systems, since each of them is currently dealing with different metadata/data formats and interfaces. Within the multinational intelligence and surveillance project MAJIIC (Multi-Sensor Aerospace-Ground Joint ISR Interoperability Coalition) various standards have been developed enable sharing data. Those range from common data representation (e.g. imagery or radar data), metadata models and communication protocols to Coalition Shared Data (CSD) servers. The CSD servers provide a decentralized storage facility in which the standardized information is persisted and available to all participants through synchronization. Using standardized client interfaces relevant data can be found and retrieved from the storage facility. By the approach of standardization, many of the interoperability issues have been overcome on a data representation level, resulting in the ability to share the data. However, to be able to understand the data and translate it into information more work has to be done. The integration of the various systems into a single coherent approach needs to be continued on the process, semantic interpretation and pragmatic level in order to achieve full interoperability. The usage and semantic of the metadata has to be defined as well as user roles and responsibilities. Rules have to be established to enable the correct. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. interpretation and validation of data. The paper describes the exercise based approach that is used in the project and reflects on the necessity of a multilevel approach to achieve interoperability.