A software architecture for federating information spaces for coalition operations

Modern warfare relies on dynamic, coalition operations supported by small, agile teams in time sensitive missions. While each member of a coalition may maintain a local information space supporting the activities of its own teams, coalition members must be able to share information to cooperate effectively in dynamic environments and succeed in their missions. We present an extensible, layered architecture for federating individual information spaces into an interoperating information federation in which coalition partners can, as members of the federation, choose to share their information with other members of the federation. Local information spaces employ federate services to become federated information spaces (i.e., federates) who can share information with other federates in a federation. Federation services provide the capabilities needed to dynamically form and manage a federation of information spaces. Both federate and federation services are designed to maintain the autonomy of local information spaces while still allowing secure and efficient collaboration between them. We describe the services we are developing to demonstrate the architecture, present our current prototype federation, explain the analysis, design and implementation decisions made during the development of this prototype, and review an evaluation of the current implementation.