Phase I: Strategic Analysis of Problem (March 2007 - March 2008)

The Joint Fire Science Program (JFSP) Governing Board became convinced that one of the most pressing problems existing in the field of fire and fuels management from an interagency perspective is the confusion and uncertainty around the many existing software systems. This conclusion was reached in 2006, as a result of numerous "user sensing" activities conducted by members of the JFSP. In 2007, the JFSP organized a project entitled "The Software Tools and Systems Study" and contracted with the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) to perform a strategic analysis of this problem. The strategic analysis was completed in March 2008 and the SEI submitted a written report to the JFSP [Palmquist, 2008]. One of the key SEI findings that addressed the plethora of software tools and systems was, "The wildland fire and fuels management community needs a platform and approach that supports distributed collaboration."

"Because of the variety of operational contexts, it is impossible to centrally predict or resource the exact sets of models, tools, or data sets needed for each situation. This requires collaborative tools supporting net-enabled methods of analysis. This flexible and extendable integration framework (what we call framework architectures) will allow tool developers or sophisticated users to rapidly configure, calibrate, or extend Web-enabled capabilities to meet needs of a specific operational situation" [Palmquist, 2008 14].

The SEI team identified three types of Framework Architectures [Palmquist, 2008 17-26]:

Type I:	typified by service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure providing services (i.e. functions) with well-defined behaviors such as on-line banking systems. Users have no say in the type of services offered or in the way solution processes are configured.
Type II:	typified by allowing users to customize services in a finite number of commonly understood ways based on shared, community-wide assumptions about what is needed.
Type III:	typified by supporting the customization of services by users for specific, unique operational situations that may or may not be shared, community-wide ways of solving a particular problem.

Type III architectures were identified by the SEI strategic assessment as the key tools to adequately address the fuels software systems management problem.

The SEI identified the BlueSky architectural framework as a leading example of modularizing and connecting scientific models and a likely candidate for creation of a web-based, Type III collaborative architecture system [Palmquist, 2008].

Based on this result, the JFSP funded a proposal submitted by the BlueSky lead scientist, Dr. Sim Larkin entitled "Conversion of BlueSky Framework into collaborative web service architecture and creation of smoke modeling application" [Larkin, 2008]. The starting date for this project was June 2008 and the projected end date is May 2009. Larkin enumerated specific advantages of collaborative architecture systems (CSA):

-	The development of scientific models is separated from user interfaces (UI's).
-	UI's are integrated and capable of driving multiple models.
-	Faster development of models and UI's is possible.
-	Direct comparison between similar models is supported.
-	Faster transition between developed models and operational applications is possible.

The question still remained whether the BlueSky approach to collaborative system architecture (CSA) was sufficiently generic to support the development of software solutions outside the smoke management domain. The JFSP Board decided to focus Phase II of the Software Tools and Systems Study on resolving this question.