SISO-PN-012-2014, Product Nomination for WebLVC Protocol, was approved on 7 October 2014 and, thus, established the WebLVC Product Development Group (PDG).

WebLVC is a protocol for enabling web and mobile applications (typically JavaScript applications running in a web browser) to play in traditional M&S federations (which may be using Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS), High Level Architecture (HLA), Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA), or related protocols and architectures). In a nutshell, WebLVC takes the semantics of DIS or HLA Federation Object Models (FOMs), and represents those using messages in the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) format, which are typically passed between server and client using WebSockets.

The Standards Product will describe, in text form, the actual format of JSON-based messages that must be implemented by an application in order to be WebLVC-compliant.  It will also describe the rules for exchanging these messages.  JSON is a structured, text-based format (similar to XML), which lends itself to textual descriptions that can be included directly in a .pdf document.

The proposed Standard consists of:

• An object-model independent section, which defines the common message headers and object-model-independent administrative messages, and defines a template for the kinds of messages that express object-model-specific data.

• A Standard WebLVC Object Model section, which defines specific AttributeUpdate and Interaction messages (expressed in the JSON format), based on the semantics of the DIS protocol and the Real-time Platform Reference (RPR) FOM.  The Standard WebLVC Object Model is designed to allow a-priori interoperability between web applications, and federates that are built on these common, existing simulation standards.

• A section describing the process and rules for hand-authoring new WebLVC messages based on extended or alternative object models.

• A section describing rules for automatically generating WebLVC messages directly from an HLA FOM.

To facilitate easy import into software development tools, the Standard will include (in addition to the main .pdf document), an Appendix which includes all of the WebLVC messages in a text-based JSON file. The main body of the Standards Product, together with its Appendix, comprises a single SISO Standards Product. The SISO Standards Product will be produced in the format approved by the Standards Activity Committee (available here http://www.sisostds.org/FormTemplates.aspx). The SISO Standards Products will be published on the STANDARDS webpage.