Web 2.0 and Mashups for Military Information

There is a very interested research paper from MITRE on the use of Web 2.0 tools and mashups for military applications. Web 2.0 usually refers to tools that allow you to collaborate with others online. Mashups are the combinations of services provided by different providers. There are a number of Google Map mashups in which people use Google’s map as the background reference for their own databases. The paper from MITRE describes tools from Yahoo, Kapow, and Google that can be used to process information. It contains an example of hunting through Flickr photos for a picture of a white van that was at a specific location at a specific time. This application ties together Yahoo Pipes with the Flickr photos database. The author goes on to describe the importance of ad hoc information processing to get inside your opponent’s OODA loop.

Ref: “Mashup the OODA Loop”, Jeffery Heier, MITRE C2C Center, New Jersey

Web 2.0 for Simulation

Web 2.0 is a term often invoked to describe social networks, blogs, wikis, and similar tools that allow ad hoc groups to form around topics of interest. These tools are just beginning to be considered as business IT applications. In a military simulation domain, they could become the tools with which exercises are planned and the data from simulations is collected.I believe some of these will emerge at the next IT tool equivalent to email and the web browser. I cannot be certain which application is will be but I would put my money on the Wiki for real business and military operations.

Business Week Article

Web 2.0 for Warfigher Training

Future of the Internet

Many people see the Internet and the applications that leverage it maturing into a system and a service similar to electricity, television, or the telephone network. They present this as a good and natural change which will make the system more ubiquitous, reliable, and predictable. However, Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard University is worried about this change. He points out that the power of the Internet has come from its openness and the ability of any person or company to create a product or service that takes it in a new direction. He argues that really innovative, valuable, and powerful products come from strange and unpredictable corners. What centralized approval board would have given the green light to projects like Facebook, Flickr, Second life, and Digg? These are the 21st century equivalents of the Web Browser, VRML, and Google search of the 20th century. Most established users of the network do not see real value in these new applications. But their value comes from the fact that they appeal to people who are not interested in what the Internet did for their parents, but are looking for something entirely different – preferably something that their parents “don’t get” or better yet, something their parents “don’t approve of”. A standardized, stable, commodity product stops growing and changing. There was very little innovation in the telephone network while AT&T held a monopoly on it. In fact, AT&T litigated against a number of innovators who dared to create a product that connected to their telephone system. Zittrain fears that the era of innovation, anarchy, and reinvention on the Internet is coming to a close. He is in favor of a “generative system” that is unruly and always changing itself rather than a platform that must maintain its reliability so that “the big boys” can reliably run their businesses on it.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Johnathan Zittrain.

New Ideas from Next Door

Where do new ideas come from? There are the researchers who look for the next big thing in any industry, including simulation. They seek to improve the state of tools or science based on limitations that customers have right now. The simulation community has been clamoring for better interoperability, shared and rapid terrain generation, and more powerful AI for decades. There are entire conferences and committees that explore and discuss each of these.

But who is looking at how multi-core PCs might fundamentally change the simulation industry? Who can see how to apply business IT tools to simulation? What about supercomputers and Web 2.0 tools? Adjacent to simulation are a number of fields that are thriving on different, but related customer problems - as well as lots of money to solve them. Digging deeper in the same hole is not always the best way to solve the problems that are in the hole with you. Sometimes you need to get out of the hole and see what your neighbors are doing in their holes. Your technology neighbors are just as smart as the people in your hole, perhaps smarter. And often by looking at a similar problem from a different angle they come up with a solution that really makes the problem look a lot easier.

Another advantage of the neighbors hole is that you are not required to be consistent with all of the historical work that have been done in your own area. You are allowed to think and explore at tangents that are just not quite proper in the official hole. Gian Zaccai at the Design Continuum says that, "moving among many different industries frees you from the dogma of any one industry and their firm belief in the links between problems and solutions." Andrew Hargadon at UC Davis believes that "bridging multiple worlds, in essence, makes you less susceptible to the pressures of conforming in any one because you have somewhere else to go."

So where some promising places to look for technologies that are valuable in teh simulation world? I like:

1. High Performance Computing, including multicore and GPU.
   
2. Business IT, including the Service Oriented Architecture.
   
3. Computer Games, with emphasis on their tools for creating simulations.
   
4. Web 2.0 because they are all about collaboration, networking, and authoring unique information.
   

When I look at what these communities are doing I see so many great ideas that can be used directly in our community. The struggle is always in bringing new ideas from the neighbors next door and convincing my own family that they are valuable. Imagine how the two Marines who created Marine Doom felt back in the 1990's when they introduced their ideas. Back then it was, "that's nice how made a toy look more real". Today the toys are overturning big parts of the industry. All of the industries listed above offer similarly powerful tools.

Get out of your hole and go visit the neighbors.

Web 2.0 Generation

The Web Browser, HTML pages, and the services structured around these all have a common feel that is the WWW to most people. However, following the dot.com bust a number of unique web capabilities began to emerge that were more powerful and capable than plain web pages. These are commonly referred to as Web 2.0. This usually refers to web services in which the user has the ability to interact with the web site, create and post content, and build networks of relationships. There is no hard boundary around the idea, but common Web 2.0 applications include: Wikipedia, digg, AJAX programming behind the Google Maps and Netflix sites, Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, Blogs like those cataloged at Technorati.com, Flickr photo sharing, del.icio.us, and hundreds of others that are less well known.

There have been a number of articles in the techno and business press about how the high school to 20-something generation that is growing up using these will be a different type of professional employee when they graduate from college. The speculation is that they will be much more creative, independent, and self-directed. They will be less submissive to corporate authority, less tied to a single corporate employer, and less likely to define one office as the place where they spend their working hours. The entertainment, movie, gaming, and web programming industries already work through ad-hoc teams and independent contractors. This pattern has also been showing itself in the defense contracting industry as companies shy away from adding permanent employees and use contractors for much of their technical labor.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikinomics

Wikinomics and Personal Creativity

The book Wikinomics by Don Tapscott explores the exploding trend of all members of society to create and distribute their own products. Wikipedia, YourTube, Blogs, and the Open Source communities have all created the tools that allow everyone to be a creator, not just a consumer of products. He feels that the generation that is now between 10 and 25 will carry with them a mindset of personal creation and modification of all of the products they use. Many of our training system users seem to already have this type of mindset. But perhaps the next wave of users will have it to a higher degree. We should expect future users to stretch the composability of systems like OneSAF to their limits