Technical standards are important enablers for compatibility and interoperability. Because many standards exist, when starting to develop a product, or to use multiple products together, one needs to discover applicable standards efficiently. Standards “profiles” have emerge to reduce the number of standards that a specific effort should consider.
From 2007-2012, the U.S. DoD M&S Community of Interest developed a Discovery Metadata Specification, the MSC-DMS. It defines sets of metadata, called “metacards,” to describe M&S data or services, a key one of which is the Resource Metacard. Because a standard is a resource, the MSC-DMS is a good starting point for a standards profile.
Recently, two standards profile efforts have applied the MSC-DMS. Both use the Resource Metacard as a starting point to define pertinent metadata. The Acquisition M&S Standards Profile has been developed by the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO) to aid discovery of M&S standards useful for systems acquisition and engineering efforts. It provides a living reference document to remain current with standards revisions, and to add new applicable standards. The Air Force Agency for Modeling and Simulation has led the development of a standards profile for the Air Force’s Operational Training Initiative (OTI). It provides extensive metadata on standards useful to OTI participants. To help keep these profiles current in a usable text format, a Microsoft Excel-based tool has been created that allows multiple selected metadata fields to be printed as a text document.
After providing an overview of MSC-DMS version 1.5, this paper will explain how different subsets of, and allowable extensions to, metadata defined in the MSC-DMS have been applied to the SISO Acquisition M&S Standards Profile and the OTI Standards Profile. A description of the Excel-based tool, which may also be useful in the creation of other standards profiles, will also be provided.