weasel1962
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Computer general, anyone?
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Grand Danois
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Technical briefing: More than maps
Providing geospatial intelligence is getting easier, thanks to recent software enhancements. Susan Marchant, of the NGA’s Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit program office, explains what these C2I improvements could mean for U.S. and coalition forces at war.
January 04, 2008
A recent U.S. Defense Department exercise, Coalition Warrior 2007, provided an early glimpse of how computer-based technology will one day bring geospatial intelligence information to deployed forces, including allies from other nations.
The exercise saw the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Commercial Joint Mapping Tool Kit program teamed with the U.S. Army’s Battlespace Terrain Reasoning and Awareness effort (BTRA) in a bid to support a net-centric architecture with selected analytical services.
“Collaboration with our [coalition] partners is imperative given our worldwide mission — it is critical to our mutual success,” said Keith Littlefield, the NGA’s acquisition chief. “NGA’s acquisition of CJMTK to support the [command, control and intelligence] community was a forgone conclusion.”
NGA acquired the mapping tool kit to meet a Defense Information Systems Agency requirement for charting, geodesy and imagery, and also to promote interoperability via common software and access to geospatial data, independent of location, with a reliable and scalable architecture.
Commercial vendors are involved, as well. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor responsible for overall management and the delivery of software. The other team members include Environmental Systems Research Institute for core technology employing the ArcGIS architecture, Leica Geosystems for image processing and Analytical Graphics for satellite modeling.
Susan Riley, NGA’s CJMTK program manager, said the teaming effort is yielding positive results: “It is a huge compliment ... to have customers tell us it is difficult to determine where the government program office ends and the contractor program office begins — we’re seamless.”
A recent agreement between the CJMTK program office and the Army’s Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) extends this collaboration to the uniformed services. This move effectively identified the ERDC as the CJMTK center of excellence for terrain analysis. It also placed selected BTRA analysis components into what NGA calls a “net-centric, service-oriented architecture.”
“This is a prime example of how the CJMTK program has acknowledged and leveraged analytical expertise within the C2I community, incorporating existing notable technology instead of reinventing the wheel,” Riley said.
Held each year, Coalition Warrior is a multinational, multi-site exercise that aims to capture and evaluate data regarding network performance. One unique aspect is that evaluators typically lack specific expertise in the areas they are assigned to evaluate.
As a response, participating vendors provided Mission Scenario Event Lists to highlight scenarios in which their systems or applications would be of use. The CJMTK team furnished its MSELs with step-by-step instructions geared toward helping soldiers work with the equipment and then document the extent to which various tools were tested and evaluated.
During the trials, a data application server was used to support the Internet-based display of CJMTK’s geographic information. Vector data, NGA’s digital terrain elevation data and depictions of the underlying road networks were housed in an Oracle 10G database using ArcSDE, and raster data was provided using an ESRI File Based Geodatabase that kept the data in its native format.
ArcGIS Explorer was the main client interface into the server to access the data content and conduct geospatial analysis. Once accessed, these services and products were then consumable by Wb, ArcMap and all C2I systems capable of consuming products made available either as a Web Map Service or ESRI Globe Service.
The CJMTK architecture was distributed between the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in Dahlgren, Va., and San Diego with the goal of demonstrating and gauging the effects of network operations on the various applications.
To make the scenarios more realistic, the trial was scaled down to a single, brigade-level workstation, instead of using high-end or multiple servers similar to those available on the Internet. The intent was to provide geospatial services currently available as thick client applications, and Web-enable them.
A number of Web-enabled components were tested during the exercise. They included maneuver projection, in which ground maneuver networks were generated using ESRI’s software. This allowed a variety of route planning queries to be executed, including fastest route, shortest route, multiple route start and end points, and obstacle and buffer identification. Speeds of various vehicle types can also be analyzed.
Line of Sight, another tool, was used to provide visibility, cover and concealment products using Army algorithms. The most recent upgrade to this tool is able to analyze terrain feature information without distorting other data. Viewshed, another software product, was used to present information in a 360-degree view format. It can find and indicate overwatch positions, and areas of likely concealment or other advantages.
In addition, a targeting tool was used to support field artillery employment. This also proved that analysts could capture target images and coordinates.
The CJMTK trial also provided supplemental services to Coalition Warrior, such as screen capture, bookmarks, create notes, identify, measure tool and a separate administration Web site that contained all the documentation for the CJMTK trial services. Also, a separate Web Map Service was available that permitted access to the ArcGIS server data and services for browser-based clients.
Of the numerous mission scenarios created to support the exercise, one was selected to demonstrate the capability of international partners to access application-ready geospatial data hosted on the data application server. This underlined the need to keep data in its native format and structure, according to James Moore, a Northrop Grumman contractor. Web services used in the trial, however, allowed participants from the United Kingdom to access application-ready data from NGA’s server.
Overall, the CJMTK trial was considered a success. Designed as a reference implementation of best practices for implementers who deploy the tool kit, it functioned better than anticipated given the time to test it prior to the exercise. Several evaluators commented that the CJMTK trial system should be fielded immediately.
Qualified C2I mission applications can receive the mapping tool kit under an NGA-funded enterprise license agreement effective through March 2014. At this point, more than 250 mission types are approved for NGA funding, and user-funded options are also available.
http://c4isrjournal.com/story.php?F=2941503
Providing geospatial intelligence is getting easier, thanks to recent software enhancements. Susan Marchant, of the NGA’s Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit program office, explains what these C2I improvements could mean for U.S. and coalition forces at war.
January 04, 2008
A recent U.S. Defense Department exercise, Coalition Warrior 2007, provided an early glimpse of how computer-based technology will one day bring geospatial intelligence information to deployed forces, including allies from other nations.
The exercise saw the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Commercial Joint Mapping Tool Kit program teamed with the U.S. Army’s Battlespace Terrain Reasoning and Awareness effort (BTRA) in a bid to support a net-centric architecture with selected analytical services.
“Collaboration with our [coalition] partners is imperative given our worldwide mission — it is critical to our mutual success,” said Keith Littlefield, the NGA’s acquisition chief. “NGA’s acquisition of CJMTK to support the [command, control and intelligence] community was a forgone conclusion.”
NGA acquired the mapping tool kit to meet a Defense Information Systems Agency requirement for charting, geodesy and imagery, and also to promote interoperability via common software and access to geospatial data, independent of location, with a reliable and scalable architecture.
Commercial vendors are involved, as well. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor responsible for overall management and the delivery of software. The other team members include Environmental Systems Research Institute for core technology employing the ArcGIS architecture, Leica Geosystems for image processing and Analytical Graphics for satellite modeling.
Susan Riley, NGA’s CJMTK program manager, said the teaming effort is yielding positive results: “It is a huge compliment ... to have customers tell us it is difficult to determine where the government program office ends and the contractor program office begins — we’re seamless.”
A recent agreement between the CJMTK program office and the Army’s Engineering Research and Development Center (ERDC) extends this collaboration to the uniformed services. This move effectively identified the ERDC as the CJMTK center of excellence for terrain analysis. It also placed selected BTRA analysis components into what NGA calls a “net-centric, service-oriented architecture.”
“This is a prime example of how the CJMTK program has acknowledged and leveraged analytical expertise within the C2I community, incorporating existing notable technology instead of reinventing the wheel,” Riley said.
Held each year, Coalition Warrior is a multinational, multi-site exercise that aims to capture and evaluate data regarding network performance. One unique aspect is that evaluators typically lack specific expertise in the areas they are assigned to evaluate.
As a response, participating vendors provided Mission Scenario Event Lists to highlight scenarios in which their systems or applications would be of use. The CJMTK team furnished its MSELs with step-by-step instructions geared toward helping soldiers work with the equipment and then document the extent to which various tools were tested and evaluated.
During the trials, a data application server was used to support the Internet-based display of CJMTK’s geographic information. Vector data, NGA’s digital terrain elevation data and depictions of the underlying road networks were housed in an Oracle 10G database using ArcSDE, and raster data was provided using an ESRI File Based Geodatabase that kept the data in its native format.
ArcGIS Explorer was the main client interface into the server to access the data content and conduct geospatial analysis. Once accessed, these services and products were then consumable by Wb, ArcMap and all C2I systems capable of consuming products made available either as a Web Map Service or ESRI Globe Service.
The CJMTK architecture was distributed between the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in Dahlgren, Va., and San Diego with the goal of demonstrating and gauging the effects of network operations on the various applications.
To make the scenarios more realistic, the trial was scaled down to a single, brigade-level workstation, instead of using high-end or multiple servers similar to those available on the Internet. The intent was to provide geospatial services currently available as thick client applications, and Web-enable them.
A number of Web-enabled components were tested during the exercise. They included maneuver projection, in which ground maneuver networks were generated using ESRI’s software. This allowed a variety of route planning queries to be executed, including fastest route, shortest route, multiple route start and end points, and obstacle and buffer identification. Speeds of various vehicle types can also be analyzed.
Line of Sight, another tool, was used to provide visibility, cover and concealment products using Army algorithms. The most recent upgrade to this tool is able to analyze terrain feature information without distorting other data. Viewshed, another software product, was used to present information in a 360-degree view format. It can find and indicate overwatch positions, and areas of likely concealment or other advantages.
In addition, a targeting tool was used to support field artillery employment. This also proved that analysts could capture target images and coordinates.
The CJMTK trial also provided supplemental services to Coalition Warrior, such as screen capture, bookmarks, create notes, identify, measure tool and a separate administration Web site that contained all the documentation for the CJMTK trial services. Also, a separate Web Map Service was available that permitted access to the ArcGIS server data and services for browser-based clients.
Of the numerous mission scenarios created to support the exercise, one was selected to demonstrate the capability of international partners to access application-ready geospatial data hosted on the data application server. This underlined the need to keep data in its native format and structure, according to James Moore, a Northrop Grumman contractor. Web services used in the trial, however, allowed participants from the United Kingdom to access application-ready data from NGA’s server.
Overall, the CJMTK trial was considered a success. Designed as a reference implementation of best practices for implementers who deploy the tool kit, it functioned better than anticipated given the time to test it prior to the exercise. Several evaluators commented that the CJMTK trial system should be fielded immediately.
Qualified C2I mission applications can receive the mapping tool kit under an NGA-funded enterprise license agreement effective through March 2014. At this point, more than 250 mission types are approved for NGA funding, and user-funded options are also available.
http://c4isrjournal.com/story.php?F=2941503
Grand Danois
Entertainer
Hey! This is the cool stuff, besides sensors (and battle management, ships, jets & armour)
.
A
Aussie Digger
Guest
I did mate. Interesting it was too...
weasel1962
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