A logical Environmental Data Model (EDM) specifies the entities, attributes of the entities, and relationships between entities in any environmental domain: terrain, atmosphere, ocean and space. Formal EDMs have been developed for emerging and legacy modeling and simulation systems, data products produced by authoritative data providers, and for systems in the C4ISR domain. The Common Data Model Framework (CDMF) is a collection of tools based on Microsoft Access© that help automate the generation, maintenance and analysis of EDMs. For example, the CDMF automates answering questions like "What percentage of the environmental terrain data required by Objective OneSAF is actually provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) product Urban Vector Map?" Other analyses allow investigation of environmental data interoperability between specific M&S and/or C4ISR systems. The CDMF was developed under government sponsorship and is freely available for both government and commercial use.
Recently, the CDMF has been extended to better support the interchange, interoperability, and use of EDMs in different communities of interest. While originally developed using the Environmental Data Coding Specification (ISO/IEC 18025 Final Committee Draft) as its data dictionary, support for multiple data dictionaries is now provided. Mappings may be defined between equivalent or related concepts in multiple data dictionaries. The mappings between individual concepts may be exact or approximate. The CDMF now supports interchange of EDMs with commercially available data modeling tools through the use of XML Metadata Interchange (XMI).
The CDMF has also been extended to support the forward-engineering of EDMs to physical data models (where the data structures themselves are defined) and realizations using commercial technology. For terrain representation, one physical data model takes the form of an ESRI Geodatabase. ESRI Geodatabase implementations are in current use in a number of Joint and Army systems, all key to the evolving National System for Geospatial Intelligence.