An updated plan released by the White House in late December for achieving maritime domain awareness is heavy on the calls for information sharing, and use of cloud-based resources.  The plan merges two previously separate plans published in 2005–the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness and the Global Maritime Intelligence Integration Plan.

Although the plan is not very specific, the new plan calls for organizations involved in monitoring the maritime domain to transition from “organization-centric databases to web-centric enterprise services that retrieve data from multiple sources (e.g. clouds, databases).”  This provides a new path for maritime, in that they will move from on premise- or ship-centric, to Internet-delivered information.

“It also calls for data to conform to recognized standards, naming the National Information Exchange Model as an example. NIEM is a set of standardized XML schemas built on a core of commonly defined data components, and is used as a data exchange method by federal, state and local governments; the Defense Department officially adopted it in March, favoring it over UCore. Managed by the Homeland Security Department, the NIEM community of interest released in October the third version of NIEM.”