Web services: evolving techniques in net-centric operations

Web services are often seen as the net-centric enabling technology for many US Navy operations. While Web services are increasingly used for data distribution in a network centric environment, Web services only constitute a baseline specification that provides the foundation on which application developers, under current approaches, write specialized software in order to retrieve data over the Internet. Software development and maintenance can increase with the increase in number of different available Web services due to such factors as new XML schema, XML schema versioning differences and variations in interface methods. In this paper, we provide an overview of Web services and provide examples of Web services for Navy net-centric operations as applied to meteorological and oceanographic (MetOc) data. We then present issues related to the evolution of MetOc Web services to particular Navy needs. Finally, we describe a new project we have begun, the Advanced MetOc Broker (AMB), which will assist with minimizing specialized software development for new and ad hoc Web services for the MetOc domain. The AMB will apply MetOc ontologies to knowledge-based techniques in order to support an advanced approach to the use of Web services; namely, the automated identification and retrieval of MetOc data.