Rapid #GEOINT update - a standards-based SOA perspective

Rapid GEOINT Update

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GEOINT has traditionally been a product-focused, read-only business. But this “one-way” model doesn’t allow analysts and warriors to easily affect the content in a way that can be immediately shared in a net-centric environment.

But new geospatial enterprise services implementing OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) break the one-way model, and let analysts and warriors interact with net-centric sources and affect remote content. This is possible because OGC has not only standards dealing with maps, imagery and metadata but a very powerful concept supported by the WFS specification – Transactions. WFS Transactions allow users to select mission-critical information and then push out value-added content for reuse by others. This two-way information flow makes is possible to interact and share geospatial content. For example, users can add or revise data from the front lines providing instant update to the rest of the net-centric geospatial services environment.

How? The "WFS-T" provides a way to interact with and affect the remote content directly from the end-user. So an end-user can now alter the global data view from a remote location using tools based on standards. Standards-based commercial off-the-shelf software (SCOTS) services now use this capability in a very powerful fashion (see above). But to make geospatial services and Geography Markup Language (GML) usable by everyone light, user-friendly software clients are needed that can work with any geospatial service. These tools need to let users to post updates in a visual and intuitive way. To accommodate for users who can’t rely on stable network connectivity, a standalone application is also needed - and a friendly user-interface must wrap complexity into an easy-to-use application.

So now, with little training anyone can use these tools to rapidly update geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, (see above). This capability will let analysts and warriors quickly interact with geospatial enterprise services and affect remote content vital to ongoing military operations.

- Jeff