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Q&A: US Dept of Defense

Ike M. Gaamil

March 17, 2012

Area of Consideration (Facts)

- World largest government department with an annual budget of $550 billion.employs 700,000 civilians and around 2.5 million soldiers

- DoD has played a pioneering role in information technology since 1949. Itsresearch arm, DARPA, invented the precursor to the Internet, ARPAnet.

- The DoD has not escaped one of the most crippling afflictions in enterprise IT siloed legacy data sources.

- DoD Giant project called DIMHRS (Defense Integrated Military HumanResources System), which was designed to be a single integrated personnelsystem that could access all the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps humanresources databases around the world.

- But these were all static relational databases, and the cost and complexity ofconnecting them was extremely high. The services couldnt agree on any shareddefinitions, and the database schemas that they used were changing even as wewere trying to connect them together.

- But these were all static relational databases, and the cost and complexity ofconnecting them was extremely high. The services couldnt agree on any shareddefinitions, and the database schemas that they used were changing even as we

were trying to connect them together.- After 11 years and about $1 billion had been spent on the project, it becameclear that the interconnection problems were never going to be solved. InJanuary 2010, former deputy secretary of defense Gordon England cancelled theDIMHRS programme, just as he announced he was leaving office.

- They came across something called data virtualization. This means when yourun a query, you reach into your authoritative data stores and aggregate ittogether in real time. The data doesnt persist its only there while you answeryour question.

- But data virtualisation uses translations you translate the data into a commondefinition when you run the query. Every time you do one of these translations itconsumes processor cycles, and you end up with a very slow system, so welooked for other ways of doing it.

- Someone suggested about semantic technology, which was developed in the1990s by DARPA [the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] for theintelligence community, which has the job of gathering and analysing bothstructured and unstructured data from around the world, in as near real time aspossible.

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- In semantic technology, the record of all meanings is the ontology, which is madeup of RDF [Resource Description Framework] triples. They are called thatbecause they have three components: the subject, the predicate and the object.

- The technology called SPARQLizer, which converts SPARQL, the querylanguage for RDF, into SQL, the query language for relational databases. So you

run a query based on the definitions in your ontology, and SPARQLizer convertsit into a SQL query and it goes into the relational database.- The first proof of delivery, they set up a four-year plan and a detailed two-year

plan. The plan has two parts: the first is building the ontology and keeping up todate with state-of-the-art semantic technology, and the second is looking at newbusiness problems to solve.

- When new data sets are created using these RDF triples, the cost of building andaccessing these large data stores just has to go down.

- That will lead to faster decisions we need to make now, and more certainty indecisions we have to make for the future.

Problems

Technological

- The giant project at the Department of Defense called DIMHRS (DefenseIntegrated Military Human Resources System), which was designed to unify thehuman resources databases of the various military services took 11 years and $1billion before being scrapped as a failure.

Alternative Course of Action

- Data Virtualization- Semantic Technology

Evaluation of each ACA

Data virtualization is a methodology that takes a layered approach to dealing withhuge volumes of data from disparate sources. The phrase virtualizations used becausedata virtualization is the aggregation of the data from disparate sources, includingdatabases, systems and storage, to create a single virtual view from within a front-endsystems

Benefits of Data Virtualization

1. Consolidation- Combine 20 or more servers into one. Not only do you save abundle in hardware costs, but you'll see tremendous gains in.

2. Energy Efficiency- Less hardware means less power consumption. One of themain reasons many top enterprises have been able to cut their power costsso dramatically over the past few years is virtualization. Cutting down onhardware also improves.

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3. Resource Utilization- Virtualization allows you to use more of what youalready have, pushing capital expenditures further into the future.

4. Management- In order to reduce complexity and risk while improvingproductivity, an organization should manage physical and virtualenvironments holistically together in the same way. Management is a key

component of a converged infrastructure ensuring that customers can movebeyond server virtualization with confidence and to extend its many benefitsacross the data center.

5. Provisioning- Virtualization presents two key challenges as it applies toapplication management -- understanding the impact of resource sharing andensuring that adequate resources are provided to support existing and newapplication workloads. The key to streamlining application environments is tofirst determine how the four core resources -- CPU, memory, disk andnetwork -- support applications in the context of meeting performance,availability and service level objectives.

6. Resource Allocation/Load Balancing- Virtual servers that are well-managed

provide customers with a fluidity of resource pools that enable rapidresponse to varying workload requirements. This results in a reduction inoperating costs and increased productivity, allowing organizations to focus onservices that deliver business value and not just keeping the lights on in thedata center.

7. Automation - Through a seamless automation platform, companies are ableto leverage the benefits of virtualization as well as execute faster provisioningof infrastructure or applications. Automation solutions can replace labor-intensive processes with consistent, automated workflows that can savethousands in workflow costs and reduce the risk of error.

8. The Cloud- Once you've gone virtual within the data center, it's only a matterof time before you extend those capabilities to the outside world. Whether youopt for internal, external or hybrid cloud services, none of it is possible withoutthe ability to virtualize physical resources.

9. Disaster Recovery- A virtual environment can be up and running much fasterthan a physical one. As long as physical infrastructure is intact, provisioningand automation systems can have service restored in a matter of minutes.Not only does this improve recovery point objectives, but it lowers the overallcost of getting back on your feet.

10. Storage, Networking, the Desktop and Beyond- Virtual Desktop Infrastructure(VDI) provides an alternative solution for traditional desktop environments,providing IT teams with the flexibility to quickly deliver and refresh desktops,reduces the threat of potential data loss or theft, lowers the complexity andcost of desktop management, and provides end users with the functionality ofa standalone desktop.

Semantic technology encodes meanings separately from data and content files,and separately from application code. This enables machines as well as people tounderstand, share and reason with them at execution time. With semantic technologies,adding, changing and implementing new relationships or interconnecting programs in a

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different way can be just as simple as changing the external model that these programsshare.

Semantic technologies create knowledge because they encode the relationshipsbetween information separately from information itself, the data base, or from computer

programs that use the knowledge, the applications. Traditional information technologycodes the relationships between the data and applications directly into the programsthat use and manage it.

Benefits of Semantic technology to enterprise:

1. Modern, Back-end Data Federation2. Universal Solvent for Structure3. Adaptive, Resilient Schema4. Unmatched Productivity5. Natural, Connected Knowledge Systems

Conclusion

Semantic Technology would be a great help for the implementation of US DoDproject. Semantic technology will support data interoperability and businessintelligence. US DoD leverages Semantic Technology across systems to meet the goalof having an executable, integrated, consumable, solution architecture. They can usethe Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard by OMG for their BusinessProcess Modeling efforts, in conjunction with systems built on RDF, OWL, and

SPARQL.

http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/