Wg Cdr (Retd) Ashok K Jha
General Manager – Business
Development, ERDAS
[email protected]
The past decade has seen the convergence of imaging and geospatial communities within defence organisations around the world. NIMA, now NGA, was founded upon such principles, thus creating a new discipline – Geospatial Intelligence.
Development of this discipline through a combination of events and trends within the geospatial industries and the changing world’s events resulted from a shift in the following:
- Our strategic environment
- Regional conflicts
- Technology advancements
Strategic environment:
- Nations are now confronted with regional conflicts, international crime and cross border terrorism.
- Intelligence targets have multiplied tremendously in different regions.
- Need for imagery intelligence is even greater.
Evolution of conflicts has led to:
- Ever increasing need for information superiority to support the decision cycle.
- Decision makers require an ever increasing level of detailed knowledge of the area of conflict.
- Geographic awareness is evermore apparent as a component.
- Interoperability of distributed intelligence producers required to support the increase in pace of the targeting and decision cycle.
Advancing technology
Convergence has been enabled by developments in:
- Advanced remote sensing
- Commercial sources
- European centric imaging systems
- HELIOS
- SAR Lupe
- TopSat demonstration mission
- Spectral resolution
- Spatial resolution
Precision Geopositioning
- Digital information processing
- Interchangeably between imagery products, maps and charts
- Databases replace map rooms
- Imagery and vector data are integrated
C4ISR and geospatial intelligence inherently require spatial data infrastructures that are interoperable, distributed, secure, temporally-enabled and enterprise-class. As such, C4ISR and geospatial intelligence architects have long sought five clear system goals:
- Multiple, distributed sources of (spatio-temporal) C4ISR data must be brought together on-the-fly, via the Web;
- Commanders and decision makers must be able to dynamically discover all relevant spatial data and services available across the C4ISR enterprise, subject to need-to-know security constraints;
- Enterprise components (e.g., targeting, line of site, etc.) must be integrated across enterprise APIs that enable the sophisticated management of command and control objects (e.g., targets, aircraft, ships, tanks, *int, etc.) for advanced analysis;
- Advanced portrayal capabilities must enable a common operational picture to be built upon data from multiple, distributed spatial web services, and;
- Seamless collaboration is required between C4ISR spatial data producers and users, since all members of a net-centric enterprise are both users and producers.
Discovery and dynamic web access
C4ISR relies upon a distributed set of spatial data resources, spread across multiple agencies, services, commands and theatres. These resources often are multi-INT, multi-source and multi-sensor in nature. Discovering and accessing these widely distributed resources can be an insurmountable challenge, leading commanders and decision makers to operate with less than total operational knowledge.
With the rise of OGC standards, it is now possible to dynamically discover and then ‘reach-back’ into enterprise spatial data stores, without replicating data sources and forward-deploying them. These data stores can be built on any vendor’s products, and invoked remotely, as long as they conform to OGC interface specifications such as Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), or Web Coverage Service (WCS).
Products now exist that can expose many C4ISR databases as OGC web services, regardless of database vendor. Additionally, specialised vector or raster engines can be wrapped and exposed as a WMS or WFS, respectively.
Distributed C4ISR systems can be implemented within a complete web service – publish, find, bind – framework when they draw upon the power of OGC Catalog Services (CS-W). This sort of infrastructure enables dynamic growth of C4ISR infrastructure, since new services can be published, that can be dynamically discovered, bound and then chained to other relevant services.
Enterprise application integration
Enterprise APIs based on OGC interoperability specifications enable C4ISR architects to integrate powerful enterprise components in local environments while also exposing their data and functions as OGC Web services. For instance, ERDAS products offer powerful JAVA APIs that can integrate enterprise components that track locations of platforms, troop movements, or targets; generate lineof- site calculations; define emerging targets; or calculate ELINT obstacles.
The data generated by these source systems, if within local computational environment, can be accessed and exchanged via the enterprise API. Such access can then be integrated into a variety of Enterprise Service Buses. Remote access for the larger net-centric enterprise would be through OGC standard interfaces.
Access to such an enterprise API enables system developers to manage complex and hierarchical relationships between C4ISR objects. Sophisticated queries can be built against multiple, distributed Web Feature Servers. Multiple feature collections can be assembled. Business logic can be applied, providing feature collections that can be input into a downstream business process. Or, portrayal rules can be applied to the feature collection.
Logical relationships can be configured for the aggregation of lower order objects into higher order objects (e.g., ships into a battle group or armored platforms into a brigade, etc.).
Iterative feature discovery can also be managed, allowing initial feature type generalisations to be refined over time (e.g., vehicle, tracked vehicle, tank, T-54 –therefore, enemy T-54 tank). The status information and other attribute information can also be used for logical operations.
Common and user defined portayal of distributed spatial resources
C4ISR architects have sought to implement a ‘Common Operational Picture’ (COP) comprised of data from multiple, distributed data sources. However, different military services and different operators often require their map view to conform to a variation of the COP, which has come to be called the “User Defined Operational Picture” or UDOP. These variations may simply apply to the attribute information that is displayed, or how it is displayed. Or, these variations may be more substantial, such as the utilisation of non-standard ‘lay-person’ symbology. Regardless of these variations, C4ISR architects require that the underlying data is maintained completely separate from the style (or symbology) applied in the generation of the UDOP. And, C4ISR architects require that this ‘on-the-fly’ portrayal capability be applicable to real-time changes in the features and attributes within this distributed federation of data sources.
As mentioned above, enterprise APIs can enable sophisticated portrayal of C4ISR objects. ERDAS’s JAVA API comes with a powerful portrayal engine that supports not only the OGC Style Layer Descriptor (SLD) standard, but also the development of customised multi-pass portrayal rules – all in SVG. This allows for scale dependent, application dependent, and user dependent portrayal based on standard feature schemas and symbol sets (e.g., GeoSym, Mil2525B/C, meteorological, etc.).
OGC interoperability has enabled real-time access to multiple, distributed sources of data. The portrayal capabilities of ERDAS products now enable OGC C4ISR architectures to achieve the dynamic, real-time portrayal of a UDOP.
Net-centric user/producer collaborations
In a net-centric view of C4ISR, all actors are both users and producers of spatial data. As an architect, it is important to consider how/where spatial data generated across this C4ISR ‘food chain’ is archived and served as a Web service. OGC Web services enable powerful distributed architectures for enabling authoritative data stewards to serve their data as Web services that any community user can access via a needto- know Web infrastructure.
Historically, C4ISR community has differentiated between data producers (e.g., GCCS, MIDB, Tactical Sensors, *INT, Open Source, etc.) and user communities (e.g., policy makers, joint operation centers, commands, units, etc.). In the modern world of net-centric C4ISR and geo-spatial intelligence, this differentiation has largely been abandoned. Frontline users are now often the producers of the most reliable data, and therefore are not only some of the most critical users, but potentially the most valuable contributors of GEOINT to the National System of GEOINT.
In the future, this community will not only require that each user/producer publish their spatial data for C4ISR collaboration so that others can enjoy comprehensive situational awareness, but it also requires that any operator be able to discover archives of previous spatially-relevant information, including intelligence products, targets, or historical activity.
Scalable and secure
None of the issues discussed above matter if your Web services infrastructure fails in terms of scalability or security. The transition to a netcentric C4ISR model that offers realtime integrated geospatial intelligence will require massive scalability and a fail-over clustering model that enables 99.99% uptime and 100% disaster recovery. It will also require the implementation of OGC spatial Web services within a role based need-toknow infrastructure based on DoD PKI (Public Key Infrastructure).
ERDAS has proven the ability of its Web service products in large-scale production deployments, scaling via J2EE application servers on top of multi-terabyte clusters of Oracle Spatial. Clustered fail-over and redundancy solutions have been implemented ensuring continual uptime for high-performance, mission critical applications. Major benchmarking exercises have been run for thousands of concurrent users, with no scalability problems.
ERDAS has also implemented container level DoD PKI security with its Web services products, as part of several DoD/Intel sponsored activities.
Standard LDAP/CA configurations are easily accommodated with ERDAS products. A system architect has the option of configuring multiple servlet interfaces to the same server, with each one having a different security profile. And, these servlets can be configured with either coarse grained security, or fine-grained security using Oracle Label Security. This provides the flexibility to accommodate multiple need-to-know regimes over the same Web service. Also, ERDAS enables a system architect to securely proxy remote WMS resources. This means that an ERDAS server easily enables the dynamic combination of both secured and unsecured data into a single map view, based on a user’s security profile.
Implementing tomorrow’s c4isr spatial data infrastructure today
ERDAS’s implementation of the OGC architecture enables the secure, highperformance spatial Web services infrastructure necessary for the next generation of net-centric C4ISR and geo-spatial intelligence. While some would have C4ISR organisations rely upon stilted, single-vendor implementations, ERDAS enables them to build multi-vendor, best-of-breed, C4ISR implementations. And, rather than replicating data from operational systems into a GIS stovepipe, ERDAS lets you expose your real-time operational data as OGC spatial Web services.
It is incumbent upon architects of the next generation of C4ISR to understand how OGC interoperability can enhance our national security. Then, architects are faced with the selection of OGC conformant products, since such industry based standards are being widely implemented in commercial off the shelf products. With the most complete commercially available product implementation of the OGC® architecture, C4ISR architects will be interested in seeing how ERDAS can help solve their priority technology problems.
