Warehouse Infrastructure for Simulating the Environment (WISE)

The Army's current and future needs in complex modeling and simulation (M&S) efforts require increasing access to critical environmental information stored in a disparate and distributed set of databases across organizations. These distributed data sourcesare problematic in terms of flexible access, visualization, and customization of the data required for high-fidelity interoperable simulation systems. To address these issues, we propose to design and demonstrate feasibility of a Warehouse Infrastructurefor Simulating the Environment (WISE), which creates and manages an integrated repository from heterogeneous environmental data sources. The motivation behind the proposed warehouse is to provide simulation engineers a uniform logical abstraction or modelof the universally available data, leveraging on the Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange Specification (SEDRIS) for object-oriented data modeling and interchange. M&S developers will be able to create their own views of theheterogeneous and distributed data and be relieved from the tedious manual search and data extraction process of currently existing database systems. We believe that our proposed warehouse infrastructure WISE will provide an extensive, efficient, andrelevant environmental data support functions that will facilitate efficient M&S development, and thereby contribute to the rapid generation of synthetic battlespaces for future training and mission rehearsal needs.As much as 90% of the world's data iscurrently residing outside relational database systems. It is also estimated that 80% of corporate legacy data is held on old hierarchical or network types of DBMS. Thus the need for an appropriate data warehouse technology is vital to integrate these datasources into the emerging object-oriented standard. The Meta Group, a technology consulting firm in Westport, Connecticut, recently found that 95% of 250 information technology professionals it surveyed said that their organizations have created or plan tocreate a data warehouse. Our proposed architecture will serve such a huge object-oriented data warehouse market.