The Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Community of Interest (COI) was established and chartered in 2004 with a set of Operating Guidelines that follow DoD guidance, as described in the Net Centric Data Strategy and the Guidance for Implementing Net-Centric Data Sharing. In 2010, a DoD M&S Enterprise Data Strategy was developed to plan for future challenges regarding M&S data and provide efficiencies for M&S across the Department. This strategy provides overall vision, guidance, and policy recommendations needed to achieve governance and management of M&S enterprise data issues facing the Department today, and the M&S COI is a main component of the strategy. The M&S COI is a collaborative group of M&S data users whose mission is to make M&S data and data-related tools & services viable and visible to the Components and Communities enabled by M&S. The M&S COI will provide a collaborative forum to advise, educate, and influence the wider Defense community on M&S Data issues. In addition, an M&S Enterprise Data Action Plan is under development for advancing the strategic objectives of interoperability and reuse for M&S, and the M&S COI will be a main driver for these implementation activities.

This paper presents a discussion of the M&S COI and the revised and updated set of Operating Guidelines it will follow. The M&S COI structure and implementation is also presented, which consists of persistent working groups and technical teams that focus on technical level enterprise data issues. An important aspect of the M&S COI is to foster collaboration among other active and effective DoD COIs, as well as collaboration across other organizations within the defense community. The M&S COI structure also includes expedient working groups and stakeholder forums that are part of the overall collaboration effort for specific project-focused or short-term efforts involving M&S enterprise data.