The Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange and Specification (SEDRIS)

.It has been the objective of the DoD for years to analyze its fielded and prototype systems, train its warfighters, and simulate the next war. To accomplish a portion of this objective, a modeling and simulation (M&S) activity was developed. A significant component in this M&S activity was the creation of synthetic environment databases that represent the physical world including weather, space weather, oceanography, and terrain information. The Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange Specification (SEDRIS), sponsored by the US Army Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command (STRICOM), facilitates the transmission and reuse of environmental data among M&S systems through a standard data representation model and interchange mechanism. It fully represents the environment by capturing all data elements and their relationships. It also provides a standard data interchange mechanism and format to support the distribution of environmental data and promotes the sharing of databases between simulations.

The SEDRIS vision (and its process) is the creation of a data representation model that supports easy access to interchanged data through the use of Application Programmer Interfaces (APIs). The “data model”, for short, enables the open interchange of data by providing a common representation from which native (possibly proprietary) data can be converted to and from SEDRIS. Programmers no longer need to learn the complete details of the environmental representation of the other systems involved in the data interchange. Instead, programmers only need to learn the details of the SEDRIS data model and understand how to map their own data into and out of such representation. With its standardized data model and APIs, SEDRIS provides an open and integrated transmittal mechanism for all synthetic environmental data, for both producers and consumers, at a considerable cost savings.

In the future, by linking all the various tools for generating data, mining data, manipulating data, transmitting data, and ingesting data M&S users will be able to utilize realistic environmental data that exactly meets their needs instead of settling for what happens to be available in a format they understand. SEDRIS will be the tool that handles all the database transmittal mechanisms necessary to accomplish this lofty goal