Reference document

Title
C3 Taxonomy
Description
The C3 Taxonomy is a model that represents the concepts and their relationships involved in all the life-cycle activities for NATO’s Consultation, Command and Control (C3) capabilities. The C3 Taxonomy provides a tool and common language to synchronize these activities and improve connecting NATO’s Strategic Concept and Political Guidance through levels of ambition expressed in the NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP), to traditional Communications and Information Systems (CIS) architecture and design constructs. Throughout the years, many communities have developed and contributed components to NATO’s CIS capabilities but did so in relative isolation. Today, we are confronted with a patchwork quilt of systems, applications, services, standards, vocabularies and taxonomies. Even simple English words, such as service or capability, have become highly ambiguous. As a result of this stove-piping, NATO now faces a very complex CIS fabric that is not interoperable and attempts to solve this problem is often hampered by lack of mutual understanding. The purpose of this C3 Taxonomy is to capture concepts from various communities and record them for item categorization, integration and harmonization purposes. Recognizing their dependencies and relationships, the taxonomy plots and associates political and military ambitions, Mission-to-Task Decomposition, Capability Hierarchy, Statements and Codes, Business Processes, Information Products, User Applications, Technical Services and Equipment definitions and requirements to Reference Documents, Standards, Patterns, Increments and other concepts. In an analogy to geographical surveying, this approach is referred to as “enterprise mapping”, since the C3 Taxonomy charts NATO’s complex C3 landscape. As with geographic elements on maps, the assignment of colors, fonts and positions of taxonomy elements in the poster, and the assignment of text, numbering and indentation in the report have particular meaning. The mapping of the taxonomy elements is rich in semantic relations that provide the orientation between the concepts. The environment of the concepts is arranged in separate “layers” (vs. grid) and the granularity (vs. scale) in the “levels” of detail. The data for the C3 Taxonomy is registered, processed and maintained on the Enterprise Mapping (EM) Wiki, a protected internet-facing website run by Allied Command Transformation (ACT). This website contains far more information than is made available through the C3 Taxonomy poster and this document; information about lower levels in the taxonomy and the linkage between the here mentioned taxonomy items and other concepts are available for registered users on the Enterprise Mapping Wiki via https //tide.act.nato.int/em.
Level
0
emUUID
a091bcfc-8d4e-4bb7-bda6-3db7030ce014
Parent

Usage

Service Profiles

The following CIO serviceprofiles references this taxonomy node. For each serviceprofile, we list the standards which will be used to implement the functionality described in the taxonomy node:

Last updated on Tue, 23 May 2023 20:44:34 UTC
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