Here's a report on the Sun CALS Briefing held in Denver on 5/22 and 5/23. Summary ======= Sun is in an excellent position to provide CALS-compliant systems. What is CALS? ============= The CALS (Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistics Support) initiative is a program initiated by the DoD to transition weapons maintenance support from paper-intensive operation to paperless one. The fast pace of technological change and updates in system components requires equally fast updates in documentation. Unfortunately, the updated documentation is either lost or delivered too slow. For example, the average aircraft carrier has 26 tons of manuals on board, and 25% of the manuals are out of date or incorrect. 5% of all fatal accidents are traced to mistakes in paper manuals. The CALS initiative will enable digital documentation to be distributed quickly in several electronic forms, and be accessible for long-distance browsing in a central archive, speeding both turn-around time for maintenance, and boosting the accuracy of the repairs. How is CALS being implemented? ============================== There are two phases to CALS: Phase 1 (1988-1992): Replace hardcopy document flow with digital exchanges, starting with the authoring of the documents, and continuing with the delivery and maintenance of the documents with the government. Phase 1 CALS is a group of standards for contractors to use. Phase 2 (1991-1995): Redesign of Phase 1 to include a distributed database, called the Integrated Weapons Systems Shard Database, where the electronic documents are stored and printed on demmand. What are the CALS standards? ============================ CALS standards are based on international and national standards. Defacto industry standards (example, PostScript as a page description language) are vendor-supplied and oriented, and tend to be excluded from CALS standards. Some of the current CALS standards are: MIL-STD-1840A, specifies magnetic tape packaging. MIL-D-28000, IGES (Initial Graphics Exchange Specification), for technical illustrations and drawings. MIL-M-28001, SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language), for communication of document composition between systems, by means of tags. MIL-R-28002, for exchanging raster images, follows CCITT Group IV (FAX). MIL-D-28003, CGM (Computer Graphics Metafile), for communication of illustrations between systems. Additional standards that may be defined for publishing are: DSSSL - Document Style, Semantic, and Specification Language SPDL - Standard Page Description Language. With these specifications, SGML and DSSSL provide input to the formatter, and SPDL is the result of the formatting. What about FIPS? ================ Underlying CALS is FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standards), a system is not CALS compliant for the DoD if it is not FIPS compliant. The only FIPS the DoD requires for the moment is GOSIP (Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile), which specifies protocols for file transfer, access management, and email, over existing networking standards, such as TCP/IP, X.25, and X.400. GOSIP compliance is required for ALL CALS systems acquired during 1987-1990. POSIX (Portable Operating Systems Interface for UNIX), which specifies common UNIX interoperability features, will be a future FIPS requirement for CALS. CALS-compliant? CALS-oriented? =============================== There are no fully CALS-compliant systems yet. In part because there is no CALS verification body yet. CTN (CALS Testing Network), which has hundreds of industry members as is growing everyday, may become the groupd that verfies CALS compliance of a system. CTN does some testing today, but does not have the resources yet to be a verfication body. At this time, CALS systems are said to be CALS-oriented, not CALS-compliant. Sun and CALS ============ [] Sun is providing host hardware for MIL-R-28002 raster testing for CTN, at Westinghouse in Columbia MD. [] Sun has a rich suite of communication between heterogenous systems -- the SunLink family of software. [] Sun is already investigating FDDI and other networking protocols and systems that should be part of the GOSIP FIPS in a few years. [] Sun's ISV's are selling SGML parsers and other CALS standards implemented in their products. For example, both Frame and Interleaf allow users to read an author documents with SGML tags. SoftQaud had very impressive demo at the CALS Briefing -- they have a SGML document processing product available on MacIntosh, and are porting to their first UNIX platform, Sun. The Sun version was up to date with Revision 16 of the OPEN LOOK spec, which was released only last month. SoftQuad's active interest in OPEN LOOK was very complimenting. [] Sun has CALS-oriented systems now. CALS aligns with Sun about open systems and standards.