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Semantic Data Architecture for DoD’s Federal Shared Services

Brand NiemannSemantic Community

July 27, 2011

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Overview

• 1. Motivation• 2. Federal IT Spending Dashboard• 3. Build TOGAF in the Cloud• 4. Build DoD IG in the Cloud• 5. OMB and DoD Federal Services• 6. Semantic Data Architecture• 7. Project Needs• 8. Pilots• 9. Questions and Answers

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1. Motivation

http://gov.aol.com/2011/07/19/cartwright-military-it-stuck-in-the-stone-age/

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1. Motivation

http://gov.aol.com/2011/07/15/cartwright-mcgrath-say-semantic-interoperability-will-drive-dod/

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1. Motivation

• DoD Deputy Chief Management Officer Beth McGrath welcomed about 300 attendees yesterday and referred to her April 4th memorandum that said: DoD historically spends more than $6.0B annually developing and maintaining a portfolio of more than 2,000 business systems and Web services. Many of these systems, and the underlying processes they support, are poorly integrated. It is imperative, especially in today's limited budget environment, to optimize our business processes and the systems that support them to reduce our annual business systems spending. She said: "It is all about all of the data and how to work with it".

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1. Motivation

• During his afternoon keynote, I had the opportunity to ask General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff and our nation's second highest ranking military officer, what the goal of that memo reduction was: say reduce the cost and number of systems by 50%? General Cartwright responded by saying the goal was to drive the cost down significantly and get more agile results. He also said that the military's highest priority was to get programmers and social scientists "deployed to the edge" to met the needs of our warfighters.

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1. Motivation

• A recurring question has been: show me the analytic for any claim about a more efficient and effective DoD information environment. So I decided to first check the Federal IT Spending Dashboard that I had reproduced to see what the DoD situation was. More on that in my next report.

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2. Federal IT Spending Dashboard

http://semanticommunity.info/Federal_IT_Dashboard

Semantic Data Architecture Using MindTouch and Spotfire

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2. Federal IT Spending DashboardExhibit 53 Results Tab

Live Spotfire Web Player

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2. Federal IT Spending Dashboard• Cover Page:

– Metadata: See Wiki– Notes: For IT spending figures, the numbers are the actual spending for the given fiscal

year, except for FY2010 and FY2011. FY2010's figures are "enacted" as of the 2011 Budget. FY2011 is an estimate of future spending as indicated by the President's 2011 Budget for the Federal Government.

– Individual Agencies (Click on Agency and see all other Tabs).– Created by: Brand Niemann, July 15, 2010. Updated July 18, 2010. Updated August 13,

2010.• Tabs:

– Exhibit 53– Exhibit 300– Milestones– Contracts– Performance Metrics– Investment Rebaseline– Investment CIO Rating

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3. Build TOGAF in the Cloud

http://semanticommunity.info/Build_TOGAF_in_the_Cloud

Purpose: Help the Students in aRecent TOGAF Certification Course.Invited to Present it to theWashington Metropolitan Area,AOGEA-WMA and the London OpenGroup Conference Recently.

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3. Build TOGAF in the Cloud

http://semanticommunity.info/Build_TOGAF_in_the_Cloud#MindMap_and_Flow_Diagram_with_Spotfire

Purpose: An Architecture Repository for TOGAF 9 built with "cloud tools" that re-architects the architecture itself, focuses on the "architectural data", and provides an "interoperability interface".

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4. Build DoD in the Cloud

http://semanticommunity.info/Build_DoD_Vocabularies_in_the_Cloud/DOD_IG

Purpose: An Interoperability Dashboard Interfaceto the DoD Semi-Annual Report to Congress that Uses Cloud Tools to Support the Warfighter, SocialScientist and Computer Programmer!

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4. Build DoD in the Cloud

• Demo in Response to DoD IG RFI and Used Presentation at 3rd Annual SOA and Semantic Technologies Symposium, July 13-14, 2011, Build DoD (Vocabularies) in the Cloud (Web Link) Providing a Tutorial on the Semantic Community Semantic Data Architecture.

• Dennis Wisnosky asked the Semantic Community to provide comments on the DoD Semantic Training – see next slide.

Semantic Community:Suggestions for DoD Semantic Training

Level Focus ProductExecutive Build DoD in the Cloud Koulopoulos: Semantic web is

agile connections that can be changed rapidly by minimal disruption and risk.Niemann: The cloud is the broader business context to reduce the cost and number of DoD information systems.

Hands-on DoD Pilots-to-Implementations

Those that can teach the Executive and take Pilots-to Implementations

Certification DoD Case Studies Those that can teach the Executive and Hands-on and produce a peer-reviewed case study of a DoD implementation.

Note: See my symposium presentationfor examples of all three of these.

General Government

PolicyResourcesOversight

Transparency

Education & Workforce

Sector Defense & Security

Sector

Law & JusticeSector

Diplomacy & TradeSector

Economic & Financial

Sector

Transport & Space

Sector

Energy & Technology

Sector

Environment & Natural Resources

Sector

Health & Well-Being

Sector

Sector designations are needed to support new services and interoperability across traditional agency boundaries.

Example: On-line Learning

Example: EnergyEfficient Housing

Example:Smart-Roads

Example: Alternative Fuels

Example: ElectronicPatient Records

Example: Border Protection

Example:International LegalCases

Example: International Trade & Exports

Example: Global Economic Tracking

Central sector for general government support services and transparency

Changes in Use – Shared Services5. OMB and DoD Federal Services

Source: Walt Okon, July 15, 2011.

See Next Slide!

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5. OMB and DoD Federal Services

http://semanticommunity.info/A_USASpending.gov_Dashboard

Database Size: 856,351 rows by 45 columns. 230 MB!

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6. Semantic Data Architecture• Walt Okon’s Slides:

– Architecture viewpoints are composed of data that has been organized to facilitate understanding.

– Structured Knowledge Base – Common Model• We could turn all the information in and behind his slides into those two objectives

which is what Brand piloted in the Build TOGAF in the Cloud!

• Walt Okon’s Slides:– Goal: Eliminate redundancies and identify information sharing services, at the same time,

by: • Inventorying data systems and their data elements and dictionaries• which shows "data element bloat" (redundant data elements in multiple systems) and

poor data quality and governance• which leads to a mission critical set of higher-quality data elements (some call them

"master data management golden data elements" now) that increases the efficiency of the enterprise (in a virtual system on top of the legacy systems) and provide a best-practice shared system for others that need those data elements.

– We do this in a collaboration and data analysis tool like Spotfire support by a Wiki like MindTouch like Brand has been doing for the US EPA, Data.gov, SEMIC.EU, DoD IG, etc.

» See: My recent interview in Smart Enterprise.

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7. Project Needs• We need the DoD Information System Inventory to help identify Healthcare,

Cloud and Identity Management System with Data Dictionaries.– We expert to be able to build upon and coordinate with work being done for

Dennis Wisnosky by his support staff.• We need the help of the Data Stewards/Subject Matter Experts to answer

questions about the semantics of their data dictionaries.– We are suggesting a knowledgeable expert be added to our staff.

• We need to setup our tools (MindTouch, Spotfire and SIRA) in the type of secure environment dictated by the content we are using.– NOTE: DoDIS and CIA have enterprise licenses of Spotfire.

• We hope that some of this can be made available publically for purposes of briefing, training, and promoting Build DoD in the Cloud!– Brand is making two presentations next week on this kind of work: Data.gov

Semantic Web/Linked Data Team and Digital Government Institute Webinar.

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8. Pilots• Goal: Linked Open Data for DoD Information Enterprise Architecture:

– I have worked with the DoD public data sets to create some initial dashboard displays as linked data with faceted search.

– The goal is to define the DITPR data elements as linked data, relate them to the Joint Capability Areas and other data sets and documents to create a dashboard that can be used to develop IT policy supported by analytics and provided as a Federal Shared Service to other agencies.

– Public Data Sets: DoD IEA, JAC, DISA Campaign Plan 2010, DoDAF 2.0 (see TOGAF9.xls), 3rd Annual DoD SOA and Semantic Technology Symposium, etc.

– Private Data Sets: DITPR (Access), BEA8SA – IMB (XML or Excel), SNAP-IT, MDR, DARS, Service Repositories, Extract related JCIDS documents, etc.

– Results:• Dashboard (Spotfire) and Semantic Search (SIRA)• Machine-processable

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8. Pilots

PC Desktop Spotfire

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DoD IT Portfolio Registry

• DITPR is the DoD IT portfolio registry, and it contains information on DoD IT systems. It was originally established to help track those systems and their compliance with a variety of DoD and Federal initiatives, like FISMA. So, if you look at the database schema, you’ll see it’s grown a bit organically over time. One thing added has been a mapping of the systems to a taxonomy of capability areas known as the Joint Capability Areas (JCA).

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DoD IT Portfolio Registry

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DoD IT Portfolio Registry

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DoD IT Portfolio Registry

http://semanticommunity.info/@api/deki/files/13089/=DoDDITPRE.xlsx

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DoD IT Portfolio Registry

PC Desktop Spotfire

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Business Enterprise Architecture• The BEA is the DoD’s Business Enterprise Architecture, described on

a portal at http://www.bta.mil/products/bea.html. It’s been a large effort over the past 4-5 years to standardize the description of the non-military support functions of DoD. The encyclopedia is the IBM System Architect architecture tool repository containing the latest version of that description, Version 8.0. It was the first public DoD architecture data I could get my hands on. We’re trying to get you an XML export of that architecture. As an alternative, we can get it imported into Enterprise Elements (we have this software at Binary and it runs on top of Oracle), from which we could do various data extracts into spreadsheets. Depending on the problem area chosen, some of this architecture might be helpful to provide standard domain language, end-to-end business processes, etc.

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9. Questions and Answers