US Coast Guard rallies around Web services architecture

Service-oriented architectures keep rolling into more environments. Now, they're headed toward the US Coast Guard.

NEW YORK CITY (BetaNews) - Although the numbers of anti-terrorist products available to government agencies keep on rising, interoperability remains very problematic. But operations and management services company Serco believes it's found an answer for the US Coast Guard through a new "unified build" software environment based on Web services.

Speaking this week at the Maritime Security Conference, Serco's Ben Barlin said the new SOA (software-oriented architecture) approach is designed to provide standardized UDDI interfaces for the many different specialized point applications now populating the homeland security industry.

"We are integrating them from within," according to Barlin, who is senior engineer for port security solutions in Serco's SPAWAR Systems Center.

"You can think of this as a series of standards," he added. Aside from UDDI, these include XML, which Serco is using as a common language in its data store.

"We're converting all of our data into XML," Barlin explained.

Now upcoming on Serco's agenda are plans to integrate tools from software giant CA into the Coast Guard's emerging SOA mix.