ABSTRACT
A prevailing and instinctual impulse to achieve better situational awareness and a common operating picture is feeding the desire for more data in Command and Control (C2) operations. As unmanned vehicles and aircraft become more prevalent, the amount of data produced continually increases, posing new problems in processing, transmission, and analysis. Military establishments are continually fielding enhanced communications and computing infrastructure to obtain information from distributed C2 centers, as well as to supply and process the data from ever more sensor sources in real time. As this tendency is coupled with the widespread availability of the World Wide Web and other networked data sources, the inevitable result is that data is becoming ubiquitous.*
Net-centric concepts of operation require data at levels far exceeding anything imaginable in previous generations. The data demands of net-centricity influence, and are influenced by, the major megatrends identified in the other chapters in this book. “Ubiquitous Data” refers to the various aspects of this demand including collection, processing, storage, and distribution. That is, current systems can capture and store much more data, allowing many more dispersed people to have timely access to current as well as massive amounts of historical data. In this chapter, we examine the role of Ubiquitous Data and its impact on C2.
