Current information systems are difficult to change to produce information
that is tailored to the specific needs and context of end users. The
information they produce is static, and application reengineering can be
complex, costly and time consuming, potentially leading to system downtime.
In addition, multiple information systems and sources can produce duplicate
or inconsistent information that requires significant human effort to
correlate, integrate and understand. This can lead to information overload
and confusion, inefficient and ineffective decision-making, and cumbersome
and error-prone migration of information from one system to another, often
requiring manual data reentry.
The Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) is a vision of an orchestrated
information management environment whose services adapt to the operational
needs of joint and coalition enterprises for universal real-time access to
tailorable, actionable information. The JBI employs publish, subscribe,
query, transform, and control core services to deliver decision-quality
information in a secure and assured fashion with the desired Quality of
Service (QoS) to all users at all echelons. An instance of the JBI is a
dynamic system that is "stood up" for a specific purpose or mission, and is
scalable and flexible to the evolving needs over time of a diverse and
changing membership set of clients (information producers and consumers).
The JBI transform core service enhances the value of the information
disseminated by the JBI through information manipulation mechanisms
(fuselets) that tailor the information space to the specific needs of the
warfighter and mission. A fuselet is a light-weight, special-purpose JBI
client program that provides value-added information processing functions
that are under the control of the JBI. The information processing functions
take existing information objects as input and manipulate them in some way
to produce new information objects. Operationally speaking, fuselets enable
information to be manipulated into the form that is required by and useful
to the warfighter.
The objective of fuselet technology is to augment information systems with a
flexible information production capability that is dynamic to the changing
needs of end users and requires little or no change to legacy systems. The
desired operational impact is to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of
decision-making by correlating duplicative information, resolving
inconsistent information, mediating between information sources, and fusing
information together into comprehensible information products. By
leveraging the managed information space provided by the JBI, flexible and
easy to build decision logic functions in the form of software components
(fuselets) can be designed to tailor information for the particular purposes
of individuals and communities of interest so as to improve the speed and
effectiveness of command decisions and subsequent actions.
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