This document contains the proceedings from the July 1994 Information/Data Base Technology Working Group meeting and related task force meetings. RAND participated in this effort at the request of the Director, Defense Modeling and Simulation Office.

This document contains the proceedings from the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) Information/Data Base Technology Working Group (I/DBTWG) meeting and related Task Force meetings held at the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) during the week of July 11-15, 1994. (Note that the name of the I/DBTWG has been changed from the previous name I/DB Task Group (I/DBTG)). The work described here was performed for the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office as part of its initiative to strengthen the use of simulation and modeling throughout DoD. RAND's participation in this effort was performed for the Director, Defense Modeling and Simulation Office within the Applied Science and Technology Program of RAND's National Defense Research Institute (NDRI), a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff. This work should be of interest to those working in the areas of interoperability of information systems, information resource management (IRM), data dictionary systems, resource directories, data modeling and use of IDEF tools, complex data, data verification, validation, and certification (VV & C), data quality, and assessment of data management technology.

I believe this industry day is timely because the Department of Defense, through adoption of a Modeling and Simulation Master Plan in October of 1995, has begun to move forward on a more coherent strategy for improving oversight and coordination of DoD modeling and simulation activities. In a budget constrained environment, we simply can not afford to waste dollars on redundant, stove-piped efforts - we need to be able to get more mileage out of the models and simulations we build. In an environment that is increasingly joint, often coalition, and involving system of systems architectural trades, we must be able to link simulations together and interoperate them in federations. To do that we have to find ways to facilitate their interoperability and reusability. DoD modeling and simulation activities need to be anchored in a common technical architecture and interchange data which is both authoritative and means the same thing to everyone. For the remainder of my talk today, I would like to give you the Department's perspective on the use of modeling and simulation to improve training, decision support and weapon system acquisition.