Towards a microservices architecture to support communication in C2 applications

Command and Control (C2) operations can involve diverse areas of activity, which in many cases require seamless cooperation among several branches of armed or special forces, as well as civilian organizations, to achieve their objectives. As each organization or branch has its own vocabulary and terminology, misinterpretations may arise during message exchange among participants of an operation, compromising interoperability and potentially leading to disastrous consequences. This work proposes a novel approach for intercepting and enhancing the semantics of textual messages exchanged between different applications in a C2 scenario, by leveraging Natural Language Processing techniques such as Entity Recognition. To implement this approach, we propose an SOA microservices architecture to address concerns related to modularity, maintainability, and performance. Experiments and initial results demonstrate the viability and effectiveness of this approach, which was primarily aimed at contributing to C2 operations, particularly within the armed forces, but can potentially be adapted to be applied in other domains where similar types of messages are exchanged.