# A Heterogeneous Battlefield Situation Information Sharing Method Based on Content
## 1 Introduction  
In the battlefield, realizing an effective acquisition, transmission, and use of battlefield situation information is important for the formulation of a combat plan, deployment of combat forces, and execution of combat operations. Different services and arms have developed various combat information systems with respect to their combat missions, core operational capabilities, and equipment technical conditions. Currently, joint operations have become the dominant mode of warfare, in which multiple combat information systems coexist. The main reasons include: (1) No single combat information system can meet the diversified operational requirements of different combat units with different services and arms. (2) The development of a new type of universal combat system and the generation of corresponding combat effectiveness are a long term process that needs repeated demonstration, evaluation, and practice test. (3) The original information systems are still playing their roles well in the specific fields, but the capability of a single information system is limited. For example, influenced by the limitation of the reconnaissance scope and reconnaissance capability of reconnaissance equipment, a single information system only describes the information of some operational targets in a specific area of the entire battlefield space. The integrated application of existing combat information systems is the main system application method in the co-existence stage of multiple systems. It is urgent to realize the effective information sharing among different systems. Various information systems are different in architecture, technical system, and message standard, which lead to the lack of information inter-operability among different information systems. Besides, in different information systems, different terms may be used to describe the same information, or the same terms may be used to describe different information, which lead to the heterogeneity of semantics. The heterogeneity of information leads to the difficulty of information sharing among systems. Therefore, it has become an urgent problem to realize effective heterogeneous information sharing. Generally, methods to realize heterogeneous information sharing among different combat information systems include: realizing information interaction between systems by direct message format conversion, realizing system interconnection and information processing by gateway technology, and realizing information sharing among systems by information integration [1; 2; 3]. Obviously, compared with simply realizing the information interaction among multiple systems, the integration of multi-system information is more conducive to giving full play to the overall value of information. For example, based on information integration, a single information system can obtain more battlefield target description information in a larger scope than its original information acquisition area, so as to provide better information services for users within the system. With respect to heterogeneous information integration, techniques such as the federated database system (FDBS) [4], data warehouse (DWH) [5], middleware [6], and schema mapping [7] are proposed, where schema mapping is more convenient to realize information aggregation of existing systems, without changing the current hardware interfaces of combat equipment, and possesses better capability of data processing, as well as compatibility, scalability, and reusability. Meanwhile, using a uniform pattern to describe and organize heterogeneous information is helpful for combat units to understand the meaning of information from different systems correctly. It is beneficial for maintaining the consistency of situational information accessed by each commander and combat unit, which is important for realizing distributed decision-making of commanders of different levels and the coordinated action of combat units.