National Security Innovation Network (NSIN)

Navy Requirements Markup Language

The National Security Innovation Network (NSIN) is a network in the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), aimed at connecting DOD entities with academic and venture partners to innovate new solutions for DOD-member challenges. Navy specifications and requirements are usually presented in a narrative long form (e.g., paragraph), see example below. Common requirements types are: Build Specifications; MILSPECs; CONOPS, and Industry Standards. Example Narrative Requirement: “Each educator shall be selected based on an actuating fluid of seawater at 20°C and available firemain actuating pressure, a suction lift equal to X.X m (YY feet) of water, the capability to discharge its rated capacity against a head equivalent to the height of its overboard discharge plus the resultant dynamic losses, and a service fluid containing solids up to ZZ mm in diameter. The nozzle tip and the throat of the discharge shall be such that the flow of fluid at the capacities listed in Table I will not produce erosion of the parts under service operating conditions.” The Challenge: These narrative requirements are hard to parse visually, and nearly impossible parse using machines in any effective timeframe. Machine readable requirements are a major enabler for digital engineering transformation efforts. This student team worked to achieve the following solutions: 1. Develop standardized navy requirement markup tags extending the schema.org standard tags. 2. Convert various requirement document types utilizing extended markup language. 3. Develop AIML natural language processing to scale up conversion of requirement documents to machine readable documents