An Ontology for Evaluation of Network Enabled Capability Architectures

The UK Ministry of Defence’s Network Enabled Capability and USA Department of Defence’s Network-Centric Warfare programmes, are aimed at improving military effectiveness through the networking of existing and new military assets. Research is being carried out into architectures needed to support Network Enabled Capability – including emerging software architectures such as Service Oriented Architectures. This paper presents a framework for the evaluation of architectures that will enable the comparison of different architectures and their use to be made. The framework identifies the elements needed to perform such an evaluation, how those elements are used and how they should be obtained or developed. Further work will develop such evaluations and use Case Studies to show their value.