Thursday, May 28, 2009

Talk on SOA & open source at Indian Ocean Naval Symposium

Last week I was invited to give a talk at the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium's first Technical Summit, which was hosted by the Sri Lanka Navy. My talk was about the role of SOA and open source in building large scale net centric systems for defence purposes. My real objective was to try to encourage both local military as well as regional militaries to set up their own open source activity (similar to what the US govt has done with foss.mil) as well as to share and collaborate at least within the Indian Ocean region.
The IONS is a great idea .. all 32 (?) countries which touch the Indian ocean have a lot of common naval issues to deal with. Its wonderful to see India take leadership in setting this up and to see the kind of warm collaboration that appears to be forming. The coolest system was Singapore Navy's Information Fusion Centre (which started very recently) - a full service oriented system that allows regional cooperation and mashing up of all kinds of information sources to give them a complete operational picture.

There were 30+ attendees from 18 countries. Interesting thing to see is whether we can muster up some concrete next steps!

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