SMWCon Spring 2014/NATO's Use of SMW for Enterprise Architecture

About Enterprise Architecture in NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is a political-military organization of 28 nations in Europe and North-America, with a diversity of partnerships all over the globe. NATO's Headquarters of the Allied Command Transformation (ACT) is tasked with the continuous improvement of the NATO force structure through new concepts, capability development, requirements analysis, training and exercises, and many programs to stimulate innovation. This headquarters is located in Norfolk, Virginia.

In NATO, the domain of strategic guidance, governance and management of the NATO force structure is called "Consultation, Command and Control" (C3). Throughout the years, NATO has developed a Communications and Information Systems (CIS) capability to support C3. Unfortunately, this capability consist of a complex fabric of systems, applications and services that are not very well aligned and interoperable. In recent years, NATO has employed an architecture framework to support the implementation of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and make dramatic improvements to C3 interoperability and alignment.

About the Enterprise Mapping Wiki
As a geospatial metaphor for Enterprise Architecture, the exercise of "charting" the C3 "landscape" of NATO is called "enterprise mapping". ACT has developed a methodology for enterprise mapping and has created a "C3 Taxonomy" to synchronize all C3 capability activities. It has developed an online collaborative tool based upon a Semantic MediaWiki installation, aptly called the Enterprise Mapping (EM) Wiki.

The purpose of the EM Wiki is to capture vocabularies and taxonomies from various communities and map them for item classification, integration and harmonization. The initial scope of this mapping exercise is to link business processes (as expressed in NATO's defense planning process), information products, CIS capabilities, standards, systems and implementation programs in order to help operational planners, program and project managers, capability implementers and support organizations better understand the complex C3 landscape.

The EM Wiki is linked with the "Tidepedia" wiki. Tidepedia provides encyclopedic information about C3 information systems and related technological, organizational, and scientific developments. These two wikis are companions: where the EM Wiki is a dynamic data repository for Enterprise Architecture, the Tidepedia provides information from stabilized sources like documents, proceedings and meetings, that tends to change little over time.

The presentation at the SMWCon Spring 2014 is focussed at the EM Wiki and it's use as a tool for Enterprise Architecture. The structure of the EM Wiki is inspired by an architecture framework that defines 1) a metamodel, 2) architectural views and 3) a data exchange mechanism. The metamodel in created through semantic relations between data "concepts" of structured and unstructured information. The model hides the technical complexities from consumers and contributors in a user friendly environment. Architectural views are provided in custom reports and tailored queries from various perspectives on the complete data collection. The exchange mechanism is supported by several types of data dumps and by baselined versions of the wiki.

Ongoing Work
Apart from his work on the Enterprise Mapping Wiki, Peter has created a wiki on the Referata website to address "Semantic Enterprise Architecture" at sea.referata.com. The SEA Wiki will serve as an online platform for information about semantic approach to EA, will discuss methodologies and techniques to use SMW for this purpose, and provide references and examples.
 * --Peter J. Woudsma (talk) 19:21, 22 June 2016 (CEST) Note: This didn't materialize very well. It was a nice idea to start with, but I was too much distracted by other wiki-released things that I didn't get much work done. The SEA referata site is taken down. In the meantime I became involved in the programming of the Enterprise MediaWiki Conference, which covers a lot of the aspects I wanted to talk about..

About the Speaker
Peter Jacques Woudsma is a civilian employee of NATO. He is the C3 Technology Innovation Engineer of ACT and one of the architects for the Enterprise Mapping program of work. A native of the Netherlands, before he started to work for NATO in 2011, Peter has been an officer in the Royal Netherlands Air Force for 31 years, specializing in telecommunications and information systems management.

He started to work with wikis in 2006 and became one of the developers of the EM Wiki when it was initiated in early 2010. He is contributing to the structure of the wikis run by ACT, including the coding of templates and forms, and for the maintenance of semantic integrity. With a team of architects in Norfolk and support from experts and scientist in NATO, he is continuously expanding and improving the EM data collection, and providing vital information products for programming, developing and implementing NATO C3 solutions.

Peter is married to Reina. They are proud parents of Rianne (13) and the twins Maarten and Laura (age 9). They live in Chesapeake, Virginia.