Implementing Model Based Data Engineering Using Web Services

Date of Award

Spring 2006

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering

Program/Concentration

Modeling & Simulation Engineering

Committee Director

Andreas Tolk

Committee Member

Roland Mielke

Committee Member

Frederic McKenzie

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.E53 D53 2006

Abstract

Independently developed and distributed Modeling and Simulation (M&S) applications each have internal representations of their data. Therefore a transformation layer translating the internal representations into each other has to be created to make information exchange possible between these systems. The traditional approach is to utilize the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) to enable data exchange between any two systems; nonetheless XML doesn't ensure that data exchanged is interpreted correctly by the receiving system. Furthermore, XML does not cope with the problem of semantic information exchange. This motivates data engineering to support the unambiguous definition of data elements for information exchange and the definition of a standard approach to mapping heterogeneous data models. This thesis presents an algorithm that can be applied to the data engineering process to ensure correctness in the exchange of bits and bytes but more importantly correctness in the conceptual and semantic exchange.

The Extensible Battle Management Language (XBML) project supported at the Virginia Modeling And Simulation Center (VMASC) has shown that using a common reference model improves this process leading to "Model Based Data Engineering" (MBDE). Another lesson learned from the XBML project is that in order to support operation rapidly changing requirements, service oriented architectures are needed instead of the traditional solutions, which often seem to be too inflexible. As an alternative to having a system fulfilling a set of predefined requirements, services fulfilling requirements are identified, composed and orchestrated to meet the current users' needs in an ongoing operation. One of the most urgent problems that has to be solved is meaningful semantic data interoperability for information exchange between the services. The problem is comparable to that of data transformation between independently developed simulation systems; hence the same approach can be applied: MBDE.

Within this thesis, an XML based approach will be applied to transfer the knowledge of heterogeneous distributed databases into the domain of XML based Mediation Services. The result is a web service architecture implementing MBDE configured for the XBML example, coupling distributed M&S and Command and Control (C2) applications.

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DOI

10.25777/jcr0-dk78

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