GIF 12.9 (November/December 2014)

The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community

GEOINT Officer

Joseph F. FontanellaDirectorArmy Geospatial Center Army GIO

Hyperspectral Imaging O Mobile Applications O Hybrid CloudMaritime Intelligence O Geospatial Research Lab

November/December 2014 Volume 12, Issue 8

www.GIF-kmi.com

www.baesystems.com/gxpwebview

CLIENT BAE Systems GXP

DESCRIPTION GXP WebView 2014

PUBLICATION Geospatial Intelligence Forum

ISSUE July 2014

CONTACT Brittany Tomlinson, (858) 333-2445, [email protected]

ART DIRECTOR Laetitia Santore, (858) 592-5383, [email protected]

BLEED .125” / 8.625’” x 11.125”

TRIM Full page / 8.375” x 10.875”

SAFETY .25”

FORMAT PDF/X1a

COLOR CMYK

Good-bye loadinG bar. Hello PiXelS.inStantly Stream GeoSPatial data and imaGery, no matter wHere it reSideS, witH GXP webView.

View full-resolution imagery and maps, build products, and publish reports — directly from a standard web browser.

Introducing GXP WebView, a lightweight Electronic Light Table (ELT) built with cutting-edge HTML 5 technology that streams full-resolution images in any format for instant viewing. Navigate to an area of interest with smooth, real-time roam and pan. Perform precise mensuration using highly-accurate sensor model geometry and terrain, and orthorectify images with the push of a button. Annotate, then publish the finished product directly to PowerPoint®, GeoPDF®, PNG, and more.

Integrated with the GXP Xplorer® discovery and management tool, GXP WebView delivers immediate access to imagery and data discovered across the entire enterprise as quickly and easily as if it were stored locally. Together, they significantly shorten product generation time, streamline your workflow, and give you the power to deliver more with less.

Cover / Q&AFeatures

Joseph F. FontanellaDirector

Army Geospatial Center Army GIO

16

Departments Industry Interview2 editor’s perspective3 program notes/people14 industry raster27 resource center

mike kirschkeDirector of Business Development2d3 Sensing

November/December 2014Volume 12, Issue 8GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE FORUM

4hyperspectral heads into orbitHaving already proved its value in identifying materials precisely from airborne platforms, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is heading for orbit on satellites, where coverage can be persistent, much wider and unrestricted in reach. Several projects for putting HSI on satellites are under way or deep in planning stages.By Henry Canaday

8From topographic to geospatialThe Topographic Engineering Center of the Army Engineer Research and Development Center has been renamed the Geospatial Research Laboratory. Although some of the reason for the change has to do with naming conventions within the Army Corps of Engineers, it also reflects changing perspectives on geospatial research.By Harrison donnelly

13gis aids “battlespace on demand”A recent cooperative research and development agreement between the Navy and Esri has underscored the importance of GIS and geospatial technology for command of the seas.By Harrison donnelly

20apps to goThe recent selection by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency of a broker to coordinate with developers of mobile applications, as well as the upcoming launch of a new version of its original app store, represent important steps forward in the agency’s ongoing campaign to put GEOINT power in the hands of users, wherever they are.By Peter BuxBaum

28

11nga updateThe National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency this fall has released a flurry of news announcements covering the Ebola outbreak, key contracts, the Map of the World project and software.

23hybrid vigorMuch like their gas-sipping automotive counterparts, hybrid clouds are reshaping the competitive market to provide cloud computing capabilities to defense, intelligence and other federal agencies.By Karen e. tHuermer

“With the

emphasis

on being an

expeditionary

Army able to

go into new

environments

and be agile

and mobile, you

have to be able

to put more into

the hands of

commanders to

ensure they have

more situational

awareness. That

just cries out for

a high-fidelity

data set, which

we’ve become

accustomed to.”

— Joseph F.

Fontanella www.baesystems.com/gxp

GXP XPlorer®

locate, retrieve, and share GeosPatial data — Wherever it is

10beyond the pixelWorldView-3 heads toward final U.S. government certification early next year, longtime imagery provider DigitalGlobe is moving aggressively to expand both the availability and capability of its geospatial offerings.By Harrison donnelly

www.baesystems.com/gxpwebview

CLIENT BAE Systems GXP

DESCRIPTION GXP WebView 2014

PUBLICATION Geospatial Intelligence Forum

ISSUE July 2014

CONTACT Brittany Tomlinson, (858) 333-2445, [email protected]

ART DIRECTOR Laetitia Santore, (858) 592-5383, [email protected]

BLEED .125” / 8.625’” x 11.125”

TRIM Full page / 8.375” x 10.875”

SAFETY .25”

FORMAT PDF/X1a

COLOR CMYK

Good-bye loadinG bar. Hello PiXelS.inStantly Stream GeoSPatial data and imaGery, no matter wHere it reSideS, witH GXP webView.

View full-resolution imagery and maps, build products, and publish reports — directly from a standard web browser.

Introducing GXP WebView, a lightweight Electronic Light Table (ELT) built with cutting-edge HTML 5 technology that streams full-resolution images in any format for instant viewing. Navigate to an area of interest with smooth, real-time roam and pan. Perform precise mensuration using highly-accurate sensor model geometry and terrain, and orthorectify images with the push of a button. Annotate, then publish the finished product directly to PowerPoint®, GeoPDF®, PNG, and more.

Integrated with the GXP Xplorer® discovery and management tool, GXP WebView delivers immediate access to imagery and data discovered across the entire enterprise as quickly and easily as if it were stored locally. Together, they significantly shorten product generation time, streamline your workflow, and give you the power to deliver more with less.

In his first public remarks since becoming director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Robert Cardillo recently combined a sweeping vision of the role of GEOINT in national security with a sharp eye for the individual details that make the story come alive.

Cardillo was in Huntsville, Ala., to address the GEO-Energy Summit co-sponsored by GEO Huntsville, a public-private consortium dedicated to promoting the geospatial industry in that area.

The intelligence veteran began by reviewing NGA activities in three key areas targeted by GEO Huntsville and its economic development allies—geospatial technology, energy policy and cybersecurity. For example, he outlined what NGA did to help rescue Yazidi and Christian refugees trapped by terrorists in northern Iraq earlier this year.

Cardillo also touched on the NGA’s role in developing technology to locate the origin of cyber-attacks, supporting energy self-sufficiency and assisting disaster response efforts. He concluded, however, by focusing on a single NGA analyst who is working in Liberia with the Joint Forces Command-Operation United Assistance fighting the Ebola outbreak to help upgrade the country’s essential but out-of-date maps.

“The NGA analyst downloaded more than a terabyte of up-to-date commercial imagery,” he said. “The Liberians added their local knowledge. Our analyst and his Joint Force colleagues trained the Liberians in new techniques that have saved hours and days of effort. Right now, working together, they are identifying safe helicopter landing zones for supply drops, supporting the U.S. military in locating hospital sites and creating accurate maps of vital areas. That is just the beginning of the positive consequences of these small acts.

“In the future, the Liberians will be able to use their new content and techniques well beyond the current crisis to build a modern geospatial database about their country for a future census and future elections. This story of one analyst’s daily work shows how seemingly small acts of collaboration lead to major consequences for our customers,” Cardillo observed.

Harrison Donnellyeditor


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PROGRAM NOTES Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

Brigadier General (select) Peter J. Lambert, vice commander, Air Force ISR Agency, has been assigned as vice commander, 25th Air Force, Air Combat Command, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

Major General John T. Shanahan, commander, Air Force ISR Agency, has been assigned as commander, 25th Air Force, Air Combat Command, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

NOAA has selected Dr. Stephen Volz as assistant administrator to its Satellite and Information Service, replacing Mary E. Kicza. Volz will shepherd NOAA’s programs to build and launch the next generation of environmental satellites: the Joint Polar Satellite System and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite R-Series, as well as other missions, including the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR).

Nathan Houser, a principal in Deloitte Consulting LLP, has been selected to lead its national security sector. Deloitte’s national security sector serves clients across the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice and the national intelligence community.

PEOPLE Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

The Air Force has re-designated its ISR Agency as the 25th Air Force. Realigned under Air Combat Command (ACC), the new orga-nization will focus on ISR, electronic warfare, airborne national command and control, nuclear detection, and treaty monitoring, targeting and analysis operations.

The new name represents the sixth iteration of an organization that was first activated in 1948 as the Air Force Security Service.

The newest-numbered air force will provide decision advantage from those operations, through ACC, to joint commanders, national leaders and coalition partners.

“Placing 25th Air Force under ACC is all about operations effectiveness,” said General Mike Hostage, ACC commander. “It will be the one-stop shop for operational ISR within the Air Force, which will streamline program accuracy and presentation by the Air Force.”

As the ISR force provider, ACC can ensure consistent presenta-tion of ISR resources to warfighters.

Major General John Shanahan, who has been serving as commander of the ISR Agency, assumed command of the 25th Air Force.

To Trust, Use Your InstinctsA solution that could drive further high-risk, high-payoff research

on using a person’s own neural, physiological and behavioral signals to help anticipate other people’s intentions or behavior has been named by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) as the winner of its first public challenge contest, Investigating Novel Statistical Techniques to Identify Neurophysiological Correlates of Trustworthiness (INSTINCT).

Troy Lau and Scott Kuzdeba’s winning solution, Joint Estimation of Deception Intent via Multisource Integration of Neuropsychological Discriminators ( JEDI MIND), uses a combination of innovative statis-tical techniques to improve predictions approximately 15 percent over the baseline analysis.

The researchers found that a person’s heart rate and reaction time were among the most useful signals for predicting how likely their partner was to keep a promise. The team’s combination of focused expertise with broader interdisciplinary interests helped them address the complexities of the challenge.

While both have experience with computational neuroscience, Lau is a Ph.D. physicist with a background in data mining and finance, and Kuzdeba is a research engineer with experience in statistical learning, various engineering applications and economics. Both team members work in BAE Systems’ Adaptive Reasoning Technologies Group, located in Burlington, Mass.

Predicting one person’s trustworthiness from another’s signals is a difficult task, and IARPA chose the challenge format to solicit a wide range of statistical approaches to address it. “The overall structure of the challenge was a really positive and fun experience,” said Lau. “The crowdsourcing competition aspect was nice, but the way it was struc-tured with five submissions per week and a real-time leaderboard was the best part. It made for some unique instant gratification that is rare in research.”

During the 70 days that the INSTINCT challenge was open, 39 solvers developed algorithms using the training set and then submitted algorithms to be scored against the test set. Seven of these exceeded baseline performance for the test data set, and their authors were invited to submit their “best and final” algorithm for independent evaluation against a third, non-released data set. Lower performance with new data sets is common, but JEDI MIND’s algorithms performed well on the new data set used for evaluation.

“We’re delighted with Lau and Kuzdeba’s insight into the data,” said Adam Russell, program manager for IARPA’s Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness (TRUST) program, which seeks to significantly advance the intelligence community’s capabilities to assess whom can be trusted under certain conditions and in contexts relevant to the IC, potentially even in the presence of stress and/or deception.

“Their performance under the rigorous evaluation process of the INSTINCT challenge provides additional evidence in support of one of the TRUST program’s basic hypotheses: That the self’s own, often nonconscious signals—if they can be detected and leveraged appro-priately—may provide additional valuable information in trying to anticipate the intentions of others.”

IARPA, which is within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is currently assessing next steps for potential new research in this area based on lessons learned from the INSTINCT challenge.

Maj. Gen. John T. Shanahan

Air Force ISR Agency Gets New Name, Focus

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Having already proved its value in identifying materials pre-cisely from airborne platforms, hyperspectral imaging (HSI) is heading for orbit on satellites, where coverage can be persistent, much wider and unrestricted in reach. Several projects for put-ting HSI on satellites are under way or deep in planning stages.

Defense and intelligence customers have much to gain from satellite HSI, but reaping benefits will not be simple. The costs of orbital HSI may mean commercial revenues are also nec-essary to justify launches. Launch vehicles are limited and expensive. That may require multiple payloads to make HSI launches affordable, or it may mean schedule slippage. Choices and trade-offs must be made between the precision and resolu-tion of HSI data and the size, weight and expense of platforms for obtaining it.

Even so, industry is pressing forward. In September, Boeing received an order for its 502 Phoenix small satellite from HySpecIQ, which seeks to launch high-resolution HSI on two satellites in 2018.

HySpecIQ processes and interprets HSI images for govern-ment and commercial customers. “We work for several verti-cals, mining and agriculture on the civilian side and defense and intelligence for government,” said Joseph Fargnoli, execu-tive vice president for product development.

Briefly put, hyperspectral imaging sensors gather data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, seeking the spec-trum for each pixel in an image. That enables users to find objects or identify substances based on their unique spectral characteristics.

HSI data is very rich and requires substantial experience to work with, Fargnoli emphasized. “You are collecting thou-sands of bands. That is a lot of knowledge, like focusing on a fingerprint.”

Airborne HSI is slow and yields limited data, so it is hard to justify the upfront investment in software necessary to process

it quickly and profitably. The equation may work out differently, however, for satellite deployment.

“If we hit a point of scale economy so we can both collect and process enough to customize algorithms for mission appli-cations, then we can automate it and exploit the power of the cloud,” Fargnoli said. “Then we can do it quickly enough to make intelligence available right after tasking.”

Satellite-borne HSI can generate the volume of imagery needed to reach those economies of scale. Moreover, it can view remote or restricted areas that airborne HSI cannot. “It can take years to get a license to stage an aircraft in some areas,” Fargnoli said. “A satellite can be there in days.”

So HSI in orbit could mean lower unit costs, faster process-ing and better coverage, which may eventually lead to much wider use. “We want to start with our verticals,” Fargnoli said. “Our ultimate goal is to democratize HSI intelligence for the masses.”

Airborne HSI has developed very good technologies, but is fundamentally limited in speed and volume, he suggested. HSI promoters gained confidence from an Air Force Research Lab proof of concept with ARTEMIS HSI on TacSat-3, which helped show that the degree of risk is reasonable.

With cloud capabilities reducing both computing and data storage costs, HySpecIQ hopes to be the first to offer satellite HSI commercially. Airborne HSI has been done commercially, but at prices that have severely limited markets.

“We can do high-value intelligence and combine HSI with other data,” Fargnoli argued. “Miners can see lithology. Oil men can see whether a substance is crude oil or another type of oil. Agricultural firms can track genetically modified seeds. Defense can see what is under that tarp and if we should bomb it.”

As prime contractor, Boeing provides the satellite, selects the HSI provider and does command, control, telemetry and preliminary data processing and calibration onboard and on the ground. HySpecIQ will do the high-value processing.

By Henry Canaday, GIF Correspondent

InstallInG advanCed ImaGInG sensors on satellItes oFFers multIple BeneFIts to

deFense and IntellIGenCe Customers.

GIF 1 2 . 8 | 5 www.GIF-kmi.com

Boeing will be the sales channel to the intelligence community and most defense customers, although HySpecIQ will deal directly with select defense users.

HSI’s advantage for defense and intelligence lies in its abil-ity to discriminate among different materials more precisely and with more confidence. “Is a truck ISIS or Syrian Army?” Fargnoli asked. “HSI can pick up the difference in paint. Are emissions from a plant harmful or harmless? What emissions are coming from a North Korean nuclear plant?”

Answering such questions requires getting the best spec-tral resolution, he continued. “For tactical defense, we can tell whether ground is marshy and how traversable it is. We can see 30 meters down in coastal littorals, which can be very useful to intelligence and defense.”

HSI does not have the spatial resolution of electro-optical (EO) imaging, but EO has just a few color bands. “We have thou-sands of color bands,” Fargnoli said, adding that HySpecIQ will have better spatial resolution than other HSI efforts.

The first block of two satellites will carry 600 kg each, with more to follow. Smaller satellites would yield much lower resolution.

GloBal CoveraGe

Boeing’s 502 Phoenix is its newest satellite, weighing 250 kg to 1000 kg and designed for single, dual and multiple-manifest launches. The HySpecIQ satellites will operate in sun-synchronous

low earth orbit (LEO) after reaching escape velocity of 17,500 mph, noted Erik Daehler, deputy director of Boeing remote sens-ing programs and the 502 Phoenix product line, who said, “the sun-synchronous orbit provides global coverage opportunities every day with consistent lighting.”

The HySpecIQ system will provide the kind of high-resolution hyperspectral data needed by defense and intelligence users. A rival HSI satellite proposal would apparently offer broad area coverage and very low resolution, monitoring land resources with a ground-sampling distance of about 90 m per pixel. But Daehler suggested that the lower resolution probably means that the other proposal is addressing different markets and applications.

Boeing and HySpecIQ will collaborate on processing algo-rithms, data-fusion products and advanced, big data analytic solutions. HySpecIQ will deliver hyperspectral data products, deci-sion-support tools and integrated analytics to commercial custom-ers and limited defense segments, while Boeing will offer separate services to the U.S. intelligence community, other defense custom-ers and select international partners.

“Providing the defense and intelligence community with first-of-a-kind, commercial high-resolution hyperspectral data will be game-changing,” Daehler predicted.

HSI provides significantly more information than the collec-tors now available today. EO and synthetic aperture radar images identify objects based on shape and texture, but HSI provides insights into materials and chemical composition.

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“This product provides insights to the world that you cannot get from any other remote-sensing source,” he said.

The two HySpecIQ satellites offer an order of magnitude more spectral bands than any other commercial, space-based solution, Daehler contended. Higher spectral resolution enables finer dis-crimination among objects for identification and reduction of false alarm rates.

In addition, HySpecIQ will deliver answers to questions cus-tomers are asking, rather than just raw data. The project’s dis-tinctions are thus delivering “unprecedented source data and solutions,” he said.

Under a contract announced as this issue was going to press, Raytheon will provide hyperspectral imaging sensors for the satellites.

otHer projeCts

There are other satellite HSI projects. More than two years ago, Headwall Photonics delivered HSI sensors to a Japanese consortium for an expected launch on a Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency rocket. The project, intended entirely for commercial purposes, has not yet been launched due to govern-ment launch schedules and mission priorities.

“There is a lot going on,” observed Headwall CEO David Bannon. “There are hundreds of satellite launches for communications and traditional radar and an emerging interest in hyperspectral.”

Headwall builds complete hyperspectral imagers and is the only manufacturer to build only diffractive optics and then integrate other elements. The company does not make focal plane arrays, which are supplied by major manufacturers that can grow the nec-essary wafers in sufficient volumes with sufficient quality controls.

Headwall does not process HSI data, but Bannon believes this has gotten easier. “Twenty years ago this was a complex technology, and you needed an optical Ph.D. to interpret it.”

Headwall provides the HSI data cubes—3-D digital por-traits of the ground surveyed—that can now be interpreted by standard software.

Headwall’s sensors for the Japanese project capture visible and near-infrared (VNIR) waves from 400 nm to 1000 nm and short-wave infrared (SWIR) waves of 900 nm to 2500 nm. Each band is of interest to different potential users. For example, agricultural customers generally seek VNIR images, while mining and mineral industries usually seek images in the 2400 nm to 2500 nm range.

HSI combines all the wavelengths, but this puts burdens on bandwidth for download. Keeping images separate by wavelength yields multispectral images that satisfy some needs. “We can do either,” Bannon said.

The trend now is to launch many smaller satellites in order to provide frequent repeats, especially for disaster response purposes. HSI can fit on these smaller, more numerous platforms. Headwall works with customers to fit within size and weight constraints, and its typical imagers are 5 kg to 20 kg. Bannon said he expects that HSI satellites will fly in LEO of 600 km to 650 km.

“We build affordable imagers,” Bannon said, explaining that with a staff of only 50, Headwall usually charges a tenth of rival companies’ HSI costs. The company commonly works under firm-fixed-price contracts to meet agreed specifications.

Another benefit of Headwall HSI is that it gets a high signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio by maximizing both optical efficiency and quan-tum efficiency. “This is a technology differentiator,” Bannon said.

S/N can be 600 to 1 for VNIR and 300 to 1 at SWIR. Headwall HSI offers aberration-corrected imaging so that imagers can make wide swathes without distortions of the field of view.

HSI technology is now proven, but one obstacle to satellite deployment is launch costs. Government funding is not plentiful now, so Bannon said he expects that future missions will have to serve both government and commercial uses.

ConFIGuraBle platForms

Some companies are potential end-to-end suppliers. Ball Aerospace & Technologies, for example, makes visible-light, multi-

spectral and HSI sensors and the satellites that can carry them. They also process HSI data, noted John Sekula, staff director for Ball’s national defense stra-tegic business unit.

The satellites, called Ball Configurable Platforms, range from BCP 100 to BCP 5000, with the numer-als representing payload capacity in kilograms. The smallest BCP is a 3-foot cube.

Satellite HSI could be extremely useful for defense and intelligence purposes, Sekula said, due to its ability to detect weapons of mass destruction, IEDs, camouflage and targets, suspicious littoral

conditions, illicit crops, factory effluents, disturbed earth and night illumination sources.

Ball is in discussions with Teledyne-Brown and NASA on put-ting HSI on the International Space Station in LEO. Teledyne Imaging Sensors would make the focal-plane array, the “digi-tal film” that captures the HSI images. Neither timing nor a definite decision to launch has been settled, however, in light of budget pressures.

The best altitude for HSI orbit depends on the aperture of the telescope and the spatial resolution and S/N ratio desired. Higher altitudes gain resiliency and are harder for adversaries to defeat, but image quality can degrade quickly as altitude increases.

Ball satellites can host multiple payloads, so HSI might be an auxiliary payload; otherwise, Ball HSI might ride on another company’s satellite. Ball’s vibration-isolation technology allows a mechanically cooled Ball HSI to ride harmlessly along with other vibration-sensitive payloads.

Customers are increasingly looking at disaggregating sensors on multiple satellites to improve resiliency, Sekula explained, so Ball’s BCP 100 could be attractive for such an HSI constellation.

Ball’s Detector Technology Center can precisely design and integrate all elements of the HSI imaging system, including focal-plane arrays made by a variety of companies, such as Teledyne, Raytheon, DRS or Sarnoff. Moreover, Ball’s processing center in Dayton, Ohio, can do all the data extraction and analysis necessary to turn HSI data from any spectral range into useful intelligence.

“We’ve been processing data for the National Air and Space Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, for 25 years,” Sekula pointed out.

Further, Ball’s HSI has a spectral range from visible to very-long wavelength IR, and so can co-register multiple focal-plane arrays to within a pixel width. “For an exquisite sensor, these

John Sekula


capacities combine to limit our competitors to perhaps only one or two other companies,” Sekula argued.

Other HSI sensors might be useful for science, Sekula acknowledged, but he predicted that “national security will rely on the tried and true.”

Ball is further refining its capabilities, for example, by devel-oping IR sensors that can operate at higher temperatures with large-format staring arrays, better spectral exploitation algo-rithms and countermeasures to spoofing. Sekula expects these advances to dramatically improve HSI performance relative to cost. For example, HSI that functions at 150 degrees Kelvin rather than 75 degrees enables designers to shed 200 pounds of cooling equipment.

One major challenge has been the cost and availability of launch vehicles. But HSI does not need large rockets, Sekula noted, and firms like SpaceX, Lockheed Martin and Orbital are bringing down the costs of putting smaller payloads in orbit.

data proCessInG

A different perspective comes from Sean Anklam, president of Exogenesis, which designs software to process data from satellite-borne HSI. “The value was proved by airborne HSI, but airborne can’t do many things in space restricted for military, political and climatic reasons. It’s difficult to fly an aircraft on top of a moun-tain range or polar ice cap,” he said.

Exogenesis can help process and productize HSI data for spe-cific industries. “We build cloud-deployable stream processing analysis nodes for this data,” Anklam explained.

Exogenesis expects to process data for at least three of the four satellite HSI projects that Anklam is aware of.

Anklam believes defense and intelligence have “huge gaps” that satellite imagery could fill. Unlike the short-term ARTEMIS, “this would be persistent HSI,” he said, adding that he expects the first HSI satellite to launch in 2015, and a significant number to go up in 2018.

Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC), which makes satellites, is seeing substantial interest in HSI payloads, said John Roth, vice presi-dent of business development for space systems. “The military did TacSat-3 and is interested, and commercial customers are inter-ested. We are getting contacted by startups. At least three of these are interested in putting HSI on satellites.”

While Roth expects HSI to be launched into orbit, he also sees substantial challenges. “The imagery must be processed, and there is no generic solution; you must tailor it to each sen-sor,” he said.

There is no archived HSI data on terrain to compare new images with and detect changes, as there is for EO imagery. In addition, images can vary even on the same HSI satellite depend-ing on time of day and look angle, which can pose difficulties in interpretation.

HSI can be put on small satellites, but not too small, he cau-tioned. TacSat-3’s 150 kg to 200 kg payload was sufficient for dem-onstration purposes, but possibly not for operational HSI. Roth reckons that would require satellites for 250 kg to 500 kg payloads.

“Launch costs and availability are perennial issues,” Roth said, noting that industry hopes that SpaceX Falcons could be held to $10 million or less per launch have been disappointed. “There is no good low-cost vehicle for 500 kg payloads.”

But when HSI developers are ready, SNC has the platforms. The company makes high-quality small satellites, larger than CubeSats but smaller than 1000 kg. “If a customer needs high point accuracy, rapid slews for multiple areas and high-power sys-tems, we excel in that,” Roth said. O

Copyright © 2014 Esri. All rights reserved.

Learn more at esri.com/intelligence

Your TrustedIntelligence PartnerEsri is helping National Intelligence Organizations manage,

analyze, and share vast amounts of information to produce

actionable intelligence. The ArcGIS platform is easy to

use, more accessible, and collaborative.

G65950_Intel_Geo_Intel_Forum_R2.indd 1 10/23/14 7:16 PM

For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at [email protected] or search our online archives

for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.

Hyperspectral imaging is an information-rich technology that uses spectral color bands to identify objects and materials in an image. More than 200 spectral colors in the visible and shortwave infrared spectrum are collected to uncover diagnostic spectral patterns not visible to the naked eye. [Image courtesy of HySpecIQ]


The Topographic Engineering Center of the Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) has been renamed the Geospatial Research Laboratory (GRL).

Although some of the reason for the change has to do with naming conventions within the Army Corps of Engineers, it also reflects changing perspectives on geospatial research, according to Dr. Joseph Fontanella, who heads the lab as well as the co-located Army Geospatial Center (AGC).

“We really needed to change the name, which would ensure proper alignment with the other ERDC labs. It better aligns with current Army naming doctrine,” said Fontanella. “But it also more clearly advocates geospatial capabilities within the Corps, and more effectively conveys the relevancy and diver-sity of the lab’s geospatial efforts to support the Army and the Department of Defense.

“I see great synergy between AGC and GRL,” Fontanella continued. “A lot of the work in the lab is focused on areas that are meant to address Army capability and technology gaps. Its focus is on addressing the capability gaps in establishing a flex-ible and adaptive Army geospatial enterprise. We do that by supporting analytics and services that enable the warfighting functions, with particular emphasis on intelligence preparation of the battlefield and Army mission command.”

GRL’s research covers a wide range of topics, includ-ing terrain analysis and reasoning; passive and active spec-tral signature analysis; fluorescence; photogrammetry; terrain visualization; precision surveying and mapping; image analy-sis; data management; geographic information systems; data/image fusion; and spatio-temporal reasoning and numerical analysis.

renamed GeospatIal researCH laBoratory addresses CapaBIlIty Gaps In estaBlIsHInG tHe army GeospatIal enterprIse.

From Topographic to Geospatial

By HarrIson donnelly, GIF edItor




The lab focuses technical efforts on five mission areas: terrain analysis for signal and sensor phenomenology; geospatial temporal information structure and framework; geo-enabled mission com-mand; geospatial reasoning; and imagery and geodata sciences.

For example, the GRL developed the Autonomous Querying Threat Agent Sensor for Potable Water Handling (AQUAPATH) system to source, track, monitor and locate sources of water for producing potable water supplies for both military and civil com-munities. The unique aspect of the system is the ability to collect bacterial measurements in the field and transmit a rapid response of geo-referenced data.

Another project is HyperCube, a Macintosh and Windows application program that analyzes and displays multi- and hyper-spectral imagery. This includes the static and dynamic display of the image cube and the generation of spectral classifications using both imagery and spectral libraries.

tHrust areas

Looking ahead, Fontanella identified three thrust areas for the laboratory.

The first is geospatially enabled computing environments, which Fontanella described as “the business of implementing the Army Geospatial Enterprise through what we call a standard and sharable geospatial foundation, and the supporting analytics. A lot of the work done there supports mission planning, how users generate content, how we manage data and how we help deal with standards for sharing.”

A good example of that work, he noted, is a technology they developed called GeoPackage, which helps an Army handheld device run multiple applications. Unlike consumer mobile devices, which are able to access data through a web service, and so do not have to have applications and information resident on them, dis-connected users may not have access and have to have the data and application resident on the phone.

“If you have three or four applications that use data in differ-ent formats, you have to store that geospatial data several different ways on the device. But you can’t do that, so they have come up with a standard called GeoPackage, which allows you to store all the data once, and have it used by multiple applications,” he said.

“This is a game-changer that we worked with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) on, moving it through the process of approval as an OGC standard very quickly. It’s a game changer not only for the Army, but also for industry,” Fontanella added.

The second area is GEOINT, which involves developing capa-bilities for superior situational awareness. It focuses on devel-oping knowledge of the impact of terrain on all aspects of land operations.

Ritch Rodebaugh, technical director for GRL, explained GEOINT this way: “For several years, we had the battle terrain rea-soning awareness program, where we developed geospatial analyt-ical capabilities that could be used by operational Army units and planners, and within the training environment, to begin looking at geospatial intelligence applications to support mission planning. In 2011, we deployed those capabilities into Afghanistan in support of NATO task force headquarters, and the feedback we got was tre-mendous as far as the impact of the work on mission planning.

“We determined that we needed to build those capabilities in such a way that they could be user-generated and wouldn’t require

contractor support. We transitioned that into a program we called Situational Awareness Geospatially Enabling (SAGE). We began developing those algorithms within the Esri framework, and were able to use more readily available terrain and geospatial data,” Rodebaugh explained.

The third thrust area is human geography, which studies how information about culture and demographics can be integrated with terrain, climate and infrastructure data to deepen knowledge of the theater environment.

“How does that all play together to build a true situational understanding?” Fontanella asked. “A number of the things we are looking at involve expanding, through a variety of remote-sensing technologies, our data on the human environment. How do the infrastructure and cultural values impact the mission?” O

Top: ERDC Geospatial Research Laboratory researchers prepare to deploy AQUAPATH. [Photo courtesy of ERDC]

Above: USACE created HyperCube to analyze and display multi- and hyper-spectral imagery. This example shows a partially colorized image generated from a Lidar point cloud at a viewing angle of 60 degrees. [Photo courtesy of U.S. Army/by Robert Pazak]




Even with its new multi-payload, super-spectral, high-resolution commercial satellite sensor WorldView-3 heading toward final U.S. government certification early next year, historical commercial imag-ery provider DigitalGlobe is expanding both the availability and capa-bility of its geospatial and analytic offerings.

The ultimate goal is “seeing a better world” by moving “beyond the pixel” to provide a wide range of new and enhanced products and services, according to Chris Incardona, DigitalGlobe’s senior direc-tor, government programs, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

“We’re at a unique time when benefits from previous investments supporting NGA’s ‘on-line, on-demand’ desire are now yielding signifi-cant growth opportunities within the Map of the World content initia-tives that directly support one-feature, one-time capability; advanced activity-based intelligence; and object-based production. We’re add-ing deeper, more robust value-added capabilities, such as human geography information surveys, to coincide with advanced research and development in our geospatial big data platform, enabling data mining, automation, social media and crowdsourcing that sup-port a new construct of shareable intelligence as analytic services,” he said.

To be sure, the company’s most dramatic leap has been with the launch of WorldView-3, which is going through the final stages of the government accreditation process as 2014 draws to a close. WorldView-3, with 30 cm geospatial resolution, also offers multiple short-wave infrared for accurate imaging through haze, fog, dust, smoke and other airborne particulates. As a result, this satellite has unique capabilities that will drive further innovation for source and downstream analysis.

Projects such as the company’s geospatial big data initiative may also deliver significant efficiencies in the long run. In that effort, DigitalGlobe is mining its massive imagery archive, which covers 4.6 billion sq. km collected over 14 years, to delineate gaps in GEOINT fea-tures that exist globally.

“With the geospatial big data initiative, we are taking advantage of the entirety of the DigitalGlobe commercial archive, which is vastly greater than what we deliver to the NGA USTIL library. By using the entire commercial archive and the many more multispectral bands of data that exist, we are now able to automatically delineate GEOINT features that can’t be delineated using the limited bands available within the government archive,” Incardona said.

“What we’re doing here is taking advantage of the full, robust characteristics within the original source, incorporating all multi-spectral bands collected. Then through algorithm development and automated feature extraction, we can deliver new insight,” he contin-ued. “With the NGA imagery dissemination service, as EnhancedView Web Services and Global Enhanced GEOINT Delivery content, we have a massive platform, and plan to deliver new capabilities and efficiencies. Ultimately, we’re taking advantage of the commercial archive to drive automation and incorporate algorithms to deliver new insights that may significantly benefit NGA, the National System for Geospatial Intelligence/Allied System for Geospatial Intelligence and other industry and coalition partners.”

These advances are exactly what users demand, Incardona reported. “In talking with NGA, we’ve learned that the first step is getting access to an ortho-ready imagery web services capability that fits neatly into the user’s workflow. While government users no lon-ger have to perform exhaustive searches to discover archived or newly collected imagery, users also desire insight, such as open-source intel-ligence, from this unclassified imagery. Anything that speeds up their process to eliminate production or the need to massage data, deliv-ering a shareable exploitation-ready result within their exploitation environment, should also eliminate costs and ultimately improve performance.”

Among the company’s other new and enhanced capabilities is its Insight Platform for social media, which incorporates roughly 15 mil-lion daily tweets produced around the world.

“To better support legacy and transformational progress, we’ve built unique capabilities that incorporate social media as geotagged, location-based services to perform sentiment analysis,” he noted. “Based on social media trend analysis, you can see where people are happier or sadder within a given region, and the direct correlation to local events. Social media provides dynamic and immediate insight and is useful information to tip and queue for new or missing GEOINT content. Our ability to use data that aids satellite tasking also enables downstream production and analysis.

“Like never before, we are seeing and responding to human and natural-world events, then incorporating current and new technol-ogy that better assists government and humanitarian relief efforts. We are now delivering human geography information surveys consisting of more than 60 layers of GEOINT content. Developed for U.S. gov-ernment customers, these data incorporate open-source and newly acquired features or refined content, driving human geography pat-tern analysis. I can’t mention these initiatives without highlighting our TomNod crowdsourcing platform. Our crowdsourcing capability leverages controlled or uncontrolled user groups to rapidly assess and delineate feature-level conditions presented within the imagery. In an effort to find the missing Malaysian Airlines [flight] MH370, we suc-cessfully collected 15 million objects from over 8 million participants within a week’s time.”

Although other companies may uniquely offer imagery collec-tion and dissemination, ortho-production, feature collection, social media, human geography, or crowdsourcing, none offers these ser-vices in tandem with a robust satellite constellation or on the scale of DigitalGlobe, Incardona said.

“We are very well aligned with NGA’s and Director Robert Cardillo’s vision to exploit commercial capabilities that will result in immediate and shareable, unclassified intelligence,” he concluded. “Notwithstanding, in highlighting these important goals, we are very sensitive about how our capabilities emerge, and will continue to work with government and industry partners in achieving them.” O

remote-sensInG leader provIdes sHareaBle IntellIGenCe tHrouGH a wIde ranGe oF new and enHanCed servICes.

Beyond the Pixel


nGa maps Bolster eBola FIGHt

NGA has released a public-facing web-site (https://nga.maps.arcgis.com/home) to assist U.S. and international relief efforts to combat the spread of the Ebola virus, providing unprecedented online access to its unclassified geospatial intel-ligence in support of lead federal agencies and partners.

NGA’s efforts add important value to the support offered by other organiza-tions, including the All Partners Access Network (APAN), which provides com-munity spaces and collaborative tools to the Department of Defense and mis-sion partners to leverage information to effectively plan, train and respond to mission objectives.

“The dynamic site provided by NGA allows the agency to automatically fed-erate its geospatial content, which is then used by organizations such as APAN for mission-related efforts,” said agency Director Robert Cardillo.

The agency’s focus on unclassified support to the crisis allows its content to be available with no caveats or limits in distribution. Because of the large num-ber of non-governmental organizations involved in the relief effort, NGA has had to take a different approach to dissemi-nating unclassified information so the people who need NGA’s information on the crisis have it.

The dynamic site uses Esri’s ArcGIS Platform hosted in the cloud by Amazon Web Services. The site features various base maps that provide foundational

context for users, who will then have the ability to visually overlay public NGA data and ingest open-source data. NGA’s data can provide logistical information relevant to the situation on the ground affected by the Ebola crisis.

NGA’s first exposure of data includes geospatial layers relevant to the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, including cultural places and structures, as well as com-munication, electric power and ground transportation infrastructure. For exam-ple, Ebola cases by province and loca-tions of emergency treatment units will be visually accessible for users to ascer-tain the distance from a certain airfield to the closest emergency treatment unit.

layInG tHe FoundatIons

NGA has announced a total of 10 con-tracts awarded to eight companies over the past year and a half to provide sup-port to the agency’s foundation geospa-tial intelligence.

Foundation data makes up the basic layer for NGA operations to successfully meet the challenges of today’s require-ments and crises, as well as the day-to-day operations of tomorrow.

The acquisitions support NGA’s foun-dation geospatial intelligence mission and provide data used in the Map of the World. Companies were competitively selected for their innovative solutions to managing foundation geospatial intelli-gence content. NGA awarded the follow-ing contracts and services:

• Geographic Services, which won the five-year, $25 million geographic names and boundaries contract, to provide GEOINT services such as data assessment and temporal and spatial data enabling, data collection and maintenance, emerging data sets and services, and crisis and surge support.

• Boeing, which received the Flight Information Publications (FLIP) aeronautical charts contract, valued at $31 million over four years. The contract provides content management and product finishing support to aeronautical safety of navigation charts used by pilots and navigators around the world.

• Leidos, which won three contracts. The FLIP Aeronautical Text contract, valued at $14 million over four years, provides aeronautical data translations, text finished products, aeronautical source processing services, FLIP DVD, aeronautical application and data delivery for the aerospatial web service in support of critical aeronautical safety of navigation mission requirements.

• The global products and services contract, valued at $39 million over three years, provides global product finishing for navigation planning products; compressed ARC digitized raster graphic/enhanced compressed raster graphic/geo-referenced portable document format finishing services; and emerging products and product dissemination services.

(Editor’s Note: This fall, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency released a flurry of news announcements covering the Ebola outbreak, key contracts, the Map of the World project and software. Summaries appear below.)

NGA


Update


• The foundation geospatial intelligence maritime-Pacific contract, valued at $32 million over four years, provides maritime data content management for digital nautical charts (continual maintenance, data cleanup, vector data update, and new library collection and new source incorporation); sailing directions geo tag; maritime product finishing for standard nautical charts and littoral planning charts; classified and unclassified network connectivity; emerging products, data and services; and crisis and surge support for approximately half the globe for the maritime safety of navigation mission supporting mariners around the world.

• Harris, which won the foundation geospatial intelligence content management Region A contract, which is valued at $334 million over five years. The contract provides content management for features, elevation and human geography requirements; product finishing for topographic, elevation, and controlled imagery requirements; classified and unclassified network connectivity; emerging products, data, and services; and crisis and surge support for U.S. Pacific Command and U.S. Northern Command mission requirements.

• Harris also won the foundation geospatial intelligence content management contract for Region C, which is valued at $313 million over five years. The contract provides similar services for U.S. African Command and U.S. Southern Command.

• BAE Systems, which won the foundation geospatial intelligence content management Region B contract, valued at $295 million over five years. The contract provides similar services for U.S. Central Command and U.S. European Command.

• CACI, which received the foundation geospatial intelligence maritime-Atlantic contract, valued at approximately $32 million over four years. The contract provides services similar to those under the maritime-Pacific contract.

• Woolpert, which won the commercial airborne contract, valued at $32

million over three years. The contract provides commercial airborne services for data collection, rapid response, and worldwide requirements using LiDAR, four-band and radar sensors.

aCCeleratInG map oF tHe world

NGA selected five companies to deliver innovative solutions as part of a $2 mil-lion challenge to deliver basic or applied research, concept exploration and capa-bility demonstration in challenge areas that accelerate and strengthen the agen-cy’s Map of the World (MoW).

NGA issued the challenge focusing on three areas that will help accelerate the MoW efforts. It received 73 proposals, from which it selected five companies:

Employing link data technology. MapLarge was selected for its proposal to provide a unique, high-performance search, query and visualization engine that can dynamically render and visualize large high-resolution data sets. MapLarge plans to perform rapid pattern analysis using rich interactive visuals supported by a rapid, dynamic visual analytic pipe-line. The company will build a prototype to allow analysts interactive explora-tion of large-scale linked data with real-time queries and visuals of logical and spatial data.

ImageMatters was selected for its pro-posed linked-data strategy addressing the integration of object-based-intelligence with foundation geospatial intelligence. This will enhance NGA’s capability to gen-erate, curate, analyze and share struc-tured OBI as linked data with originating information tracking.

Conflating data from varying sources. Boeing was selected for a proposal to demonstrate the workflows and processes for performing rapid data assessment of foundation GEOINT. This proposal will demonstrate data assessment workflows for NGA’s NextGen production model to determine and enhance the quality and currency of data in Map of the World. Boeing’s workflow focuses on the spatial quality of the data and the completeness and currency of the attribution of all fea-tures in MoW.

Developing a framework for user-generated content. SRI International was awarded a contract based on its proposal for a comprehensive user-generated con-tent (UGC) collection that demonstrates

key modules and use cases for ingestion, analysis and dissemination framework. SRI proposes to leverage its experience in developing UGC solutions and work closely with NGA to develop a com-prehensive framework for exploitation and integration of UGC into the MoW content services.

Data Inc. was selected for proposing a unique implementation approach of UGC to facilitate geospatial, temporal and the-matic discovery through 3-D visualiza-tion that enhances end-user retention, recall and transfer of data. Its proposal addresses harnessing UGC with real-time information, a resource currently not available to NGA.

GamInG For staFF aCHIevement

NGA released gamification software code that gives awards or badges to users and operates as a standalone application or can be integrated with other web-based applications to increase learning, pro-cessing and output. The code was posted on the agency’s organizational account on GitHub, an open-source, collaborative software development environment.

“Government game development efforts are exponentially on the rise today,” said Director Robert Cardillo. “The current generation of professionals is discovering the collaborative learning power of using games in standard busi-ness practices, and the newer generation is already familiar with how these new technologies are powerful learning tools.”

NGA’s gamification software also pro-vides a customizable web interface for dis-playing badges and a configurable rules engine that translates actions performed by users into awards, said Ray Bauer, an NGA IT innovation lead. Incorporating aspects of gaming into day-to-day analysis and activities can inspire new approaches and innovation among all levels of staff, Bauer suggested.

“The use of badging and awards rec-ognizes what achievements matter most based on agency priorities, and rewards the user in the context of their work,” he said. O

For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.

com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.


A recent cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) between the Navy and Esri has underscored the importance of GIS and geospatial technology for command of the seas.

The alliance between the company and Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command (NAVMETOCCOM) will focus on bringing together the vast amounts of sea and weather data collected by the Navy with spatial analytics and enterprise collaboration technology. The goal is to enable commanders to make faster decisions by better incorporating conditions directly into their operational plans, as part of a Navy concept called “battlespace on demand” (BonD).

The three-year CRADA establishes a working relationship between Esri and NAVMETOCCOM, which has been an Esri software customer for more than a decade. With the new CRADA, Esri per-sonnel will see naval oceanography work firsthand and potentially develop additional applications as they collaborate with Navy opera-tional oceanography modeling experts at the Naval Oceanographic Office, NAVMETOCCOM’s largest subordinate activity.

Geospatial information is already a key part of the command’s mission support to naval forces, according to Dr. William H. Burnett, NAVMETOCCOM’s deputy commander and technical director.

“We employ a variety of GIS COTS and GOTS tools to perform geospatial layer production of environmental features and phenom-ena, visualization products and services, multidomain data fusion bringing together intelligence, command and control and meteoro-logical and oceanographic information, and mission-based multicri-teria analysis to support warfighter planning and execution decision processes. We see geospatial technologies, processes and skills as key for dynamic integration of meteorology and oceanography into a col-laborative geospatial reasoning process,” Burnett said.

Indeed, while the ocean surface may be relatively flat, its dynamic and diverse characteristics are well-suited to benefit from GIS tech-nology, noted Curt Hammill, Navy C2 account manager for Esri.

“Bathymetry helps define underwater operations. Features on the bottom such as underwater cables or pipelines are of interest for naval operations,” he said. “On the surface, commercial ship oper-ations are vital features to understand threats of smuggling and piracy. Areas of high wind and waves, as well as atmospheric condi-tions, are dynamic. They impact whether a ship or aircraft might be able to perform its mission. Along a coast or inland on waterways, even richer, more dynamic data needs to be considered to help com-manders in planning and executing operations.”

BonD, Burnett explained, is an operational construct that orga-nizes the naval oceanography enterprise’s mission, assets and processes into four tiers. It calls for measuring and processing envi-ronmental observations to feed predictive models to yield impacts to naval platforms, sensors, weapons and missions to ultimately deliver actionable recommendations and courses of action for the warfighter.

“At its core, BonD is about organizing a successful approach to managing data, transforming it into relevant products that inform and speed any commander’s operational decisions,” Hammill said. “Situational awareness as the Navy defines it includes understand-ing as many aspects of the operational environment as possible, and then exploiting that understanding into decision superiority. Since all of the decision-worthy data has place and time attributes, a set of strong spatial-temporal analytics powers this process. GIS is the sci-ence and technology to effect this transformation.”

Under the CRADA, Navy oceanographers and Esri’s defense solu-tions team will cooperate on 10 objectives that will improve Esri’s COTS systems while also serving to improve geospatial reasoning in the oceans in support of naval warfare.

The objectives include:

• Establishing a prototype lab at Stennis Space Center, Miss., using the ArcGIS platform for geospatially enabling naval oceanography.

• Creating an Intelligent Decision Map (IDMap) proof of concept to assist in maritime decision-making. An IDMap combines data and analytics in a reproducible way. It still allows a specialist to inject local patterns and reasoned expertise into the analysis, and is robust enough to answer a commander’s “what if” questions authoritatively.

• Designing a sustainable training/education plan to enable NAVMETOCCOM personnel to deploy and use the GIS capabilities in their operations.

• Testing key Open Geospatial Consortium application standards and profiles for ocean and atmospheric analysis and decision-making. O

navy, esrI BrInG sea and weatHer data toGetHer wItH spatIal analytICs and enterprIse CollaBoratIon teCHnoloGy.



GIS Aids


“Battlespace on Demand”


INDUSTRY RASTER

DigitalGlobe has released the first-ever 30 cm images from a commercial satellite, as provided by the recently launched WorldView-3. Company officials describe the 30 cm resolution as a game changer for military and defense officials who rely on high-quality imagery to track movements, allocate resources and protect lives. Because this imagery is unclassified and can be shared across government agencies and with key allies in the field, the quality of the end product is helpful to many more than just the initial customer. WorldView-3’s super-spectral 30 cm imagery allows for fast and precise mapping of various features anywhere in the world. To illustrate the point, the company provided 30 cm imagery of Madrid, Spain, and compared it with 70 cm reso-lution imagery, which represents the highest quality available from its nearest competitor. The lettering on the taxiways/aprons can be clearly identified at 30 cm resolution, while the details are missing at 70 cm

resolution. In addition, finer details such as details on building roof-tops, the condition of taxiways and lampposts are only distinguishable at 30 cm WorldView-3 imagery.

Radiance Technologies, Integrity Applications Inc. and Invertix have been awarded a combined $960 million contract for services in support of the Advanced Technical Exploitation Program II. Contractors will perform research, development, system sustainment and intelligence production

activities utilizing geospatial intelligence and non-nuclear measurement and signature intelligence data at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center. The contract requires that the prime contractor on each team be a company with fewer than 1,500 employees. The teams also include

major defense integrators, with Ball Aerospace on the team led by Invertix, while Northrop Grumman is on the team led by Radiance Technologies. Team Integrity, a 19-member alliance led by Integrity Applications Inc., also includes MacAulay-Brown and Woolpert.

ECognition Essentials from Trimble is a new software solution for geospatial and remote-sensing professionals performing land cover mapping tasks using satellite imagery. ECognition Essentials offers an intuitive image analysis solution that allows users of all levels to quickly produce high-quality, GIS-ready deliverables. Leveraging core eCognition software technology, eCog-nition Essentials is easy to use with its simplified and intuitive interface. It reduces analysis error as it applies predefined and structured rules to analyze and trans-form imagery data into relevant geospatial information. Combined with a set of interactive tools for quality control, the new automated image analysis functions, such as image segmentation or sample-based classifi-cation, offer users a streamlined workflow for quicker project turnaround times.

LeaAnn McNabb;[email protected]

In a move with a major potential impact on the industry supporting intelligence and other government agencies, Engility Holdings and TASC have entered into a definitive agreement under which Engility will acquire privately-held TASC, a leading professional services provider to the national security and public safety markets. The all-stock transaction is valued at approximately $1.1 billion, including the assumption of net debt. The two companies said the transaction will build on the strengths of each to create a leading government services provider with expected combined pro-forma revenue of approximately $2.5 billion in 2014. Founded in 1966, TASC is a leading provider of enterprise systems engineering, mission-enabling architectures and value-based solu-tions for the national security and public safety markets. It has a substantial presence in the intelligence community, space and other markets in which Engility is underrepresented. TASC, which is controlled by affiliates of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and General Atlantic, has approximately 4,000 employees.

Eric Ruff;[email protected] Gooen; [email protected]

Acquisition Marks Intelligence Industry Shift

Air Force Selects Three Teams for Intelligence Support

High-Resolution Imagery Offers Improved Visual Details

Software Aids Mapping Tasks Using Satellite Imagery


Compiled by KMI Media Group staff

A new Exelis CorvusEye 1500 visible color and infrared (IR) sensor provides day and nighttime wide area airborne surveillance coverage. Developed to complement the daytime electro-optical sensor Exelis released in May, the sensors are available as an integrated end-to-end system or separately. The new CorvusEye 1500CM system complements traditional video surveillance systems and captures high-resolution, visible color and IR motion imagery during the day and night over a wide area up to 1.24 miles in diameter. The CorvusEye system can track movement that may be connected to potentially hazardous or illicit activity, as well as other trends like migratory or invasive wildlife behavior. CorvusEye can capture activity occurring simultaneously in multiple areas that might go unnoticed using traditional surveillance, such as full-motion video. At 15 inches in diameter and weighing less than 95 pounds, CorvusEye can fit on most mid-size unmanned and manned aircraft.

Kristin Jones;[email protected]

The versatile Icaros Digital Mapper (IDM) 1000 combines a high-accuracy photogrammetric nadir camera with four high-quality oblique sensors in a modular airborne imaging package. The modular IDM 1000 package is built around the IDM 200 nadir camera, with a new mount supporting up to four 45-degree oblique sensors. The standard IDM 1000 configuration includes an 80-megapixel (MP) nadir natural-color (RGB) sensor, four 36 MP oblique RGB sensors, a modular mount, embedded GPS/INS, a flight planning and management system, and the Icaros Photogrammetric Suite of software tools. The IDM camera family offers eight sensor design alternatives, including near infrared and thermal infrared imaging. Each IDM camera delivers sub-pixel accuracy, high-dynamic range and true-color pixel collection. Depending on altitude, the pixel GSD ranges from 1 cm to 100 cm in nadir or oblique operations. The IDM 1000 can be flown on rotor or fixed-wing aircraft and modified for flight on some UAVs. The IMT is a universal oblique measurement tool, enabling customers working within Esri’s GIS environment to view and measure structures in oblique aerial imagery captured by any commercial oblique sensor system.

Richard Baumgartner;[email protected]

TerraGo has announced the availability of TerraGo Edge version 3.1. TerraGo Edge is a mobile solution that enables users to access cloud-based mapping services and provide customized base maps to mobile workers anywhere, while enabling them to sync loca-tion-based observations with headquarters, other mobile workers, databases and systems. New features in the latest version include open

Web Map Service, which enables users to tap into a growing universe of public and private online map services to create maps and overlays uniquely tailored to their area of interest; offline maps for iPhone; easy access to the Dropbox cloud service; and the ability to act as a Web Feature Service server.

Jessie Hillenbrand;[email protected]

The Army’s primary intelligence system is testing software devel-oped by Lockheed Martin that will help them sort through terabytes of intelligence gleaned from manned and unmanned sources, improving their ability to efficiently analyze data. As part of an ongoing test and evaluation process that includes multiple stages of technology reviews, practical application evaluations and operational user tests, the Army is working with the company to update the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS-A) as the service prepares for fielding

in 2015. DCGS is a family of systems that enables military analysts from all services to access shared intelligence. DCGS-A takes sensor data from all sources, (signals, imagery and human intelligence) and integrates it into a common data format in a fused environment, making multisource intelligence analysis possible. Through multiple projects focused on interoperability, automation and efficient analysis, Lockheed Martin is modernizing how data flows and is connected through the DCGS-A enterprise.

Army Updates Ground Intelligence System

Mobile Solution Offers Access to Cloud-Based Mapping

Sensor Provides Airborne Surveillance Coverage at Night

Airborne Imaging Package Includes Oblique Sensors


Dr. Joseph F. Fontanella was selected to the Senior Executive Service in January 2011 to serve as director of the Army Geospatial Center (AGC). The AGC is the Army’s knowledge center for geospa-tial expertise and provides geospatial information reachback capa-bility to field units.

As director, Fontanella is responsible for supporting the oper-ations, intelligence, acquisition, research and development, and modeling and simulation communities with geospatial informa-tion. The center focuses on the development, exploitation, pro-duction and distribution of topographic, geodetic and geospatial information tools and services for the Army and other Department of Defense and national programs.

The center has forward-deployed and reachback elements con-ducting the collection, dissemination and analysis of geospatial data supporting units in contact. It also provides direct acquisi-tion support to multiple program executive officers and program managers involved in national and tactical programs, and con-ducts research into geospatial data management, information constructs, data generation, enterprise technology, applications and sensors.

Fontanella also serves as the Army’s geospatial information officer (GIO), with responsibility for collecting and validating geo-spatial requirements, formulating geospatial policy, setting pri-orities and securing resources supporting the Army geospatial enterprise, and synchronizing geospatial solutions at both HQDA and Secretariat levels of Army governance.

From 2006 until his appointment as director, Fontanella served as deputy director of the AGC. From 2004 to 2006, he was assistant director for plans and program management, Engineer Research and Development Center, Army Corps of Engineers. He retired from the Army at the rank of colonel in 2004 after service that included serving in 2003 as assistant chief of staff, engineer (C-7) (Fwd), 3d U.S. Army and Coalition Forces Land Component Command, Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Fontanella was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly.

Q: What are your current top priorities as director of the AGC and Army geospatial information officer?

A: I have a few different roles, serving as director of the AGC, direc-tor of the Geospatial Research Laboratory (GRL) and as the Army geospatial information officer, and there are different priorities

associated with each of those. I’ve tried to line up my priorities behind my boss’s priorities, and those of the chief of staff and sec-retary of the Army. The number one thing for us is to continue to support global military operations, including the combatant com-mands, the Army service component commands, special operations forces, and those engaged in humanitarian assistance and disas-ter relief. For example, we’re providing support now to Operation United Assistance [anti-Ebola] activities in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. The second priority is to advance the Army Geospatial Enterprise (AGE) from a variety of perspectives, including opera-tional and systems acquisition support from across the Army, mak-ing sure that the corps’ civil works program lines up behind that enterprise, and research and development activities.

The third priority involves what we are doing internally to relieve budget uncertainty. Sequestration hasn’t completely gone away, so as director of the center I have to be concerned about things like making sure that we’re securing appropriate funding in the program objective memorandum (POM) and that the sup-plemental funding that we’ve been receiving since the 9/11 attacks migrates as appropriate to the base. It’s about what we are doing to secure base ops for ourselves, to continue with funding agree-ments and memorandums of agreement with our customers—extending our reimbursable customer base. We’re part of the Corps of Engineers, so we’re largely a reimbursable organization, with

Dr. Joseph F. Fontanella Director

Army Geospatial Center Army Geospatial Information Officer

Army Corps of Engineers

GEOINT OfficerAdvancing the Army Geospatial Enterprise

Q&AQ&A


about 68 percent of our funding coming from customers rather than direct funding.

The fourth priority is to mitigate risk and increase efficiency in delivering capability. You can see on the news about the struggles some federal agencies are having with contracting and resource management. There are a lot of challenges with moving big data, and the Army is moving toward a consolidation of IT assets and data and software rationalization. As we look at an Army that’s potentially going to get smaller, how do we mitigate the risks asso-ciated with that, and how do we increase efficiencies in delivering capability? We can’t continue to operate in the way we may have been operating. Although these last three priorities are not in any particular order, the final one is to build and cultivate a compe-tent, disciplined and resilient team. We just underwent a manpower study, which is an Army process that organizations go through rou-tinely to validate their mission, workload and what they are doing. That’s been pretty successful.

The internal priorities that any federal manager would have would be regarding the budget, mitigating risk and building a strong workforce. We have the same profile across our workforce that many other agencies do, with a lot of employees who are get-ting close to retirement and young people, but not a lot in the mid-dle. As we continue to recruit, we’re looking for some middle-level people to fit into the organization. This lines up with the priorities of my boss, the chief of the engineers. His priorities are to defend and protect the nation by supporting the warfighter, transform the corps’ civil works program and build the corps for the future, and ours line up with those.

Q: How do you see the role of the AGC evolving in the future as the Army and nation move “beyond the current fight”?

A: One of the things we’ve been doing over the past several months has been a series of program reviews. Back in the 80s and 90s, we were focused on one place—the central plains of Europe. Even in Desert Storm, we had a level of fidelity with mapping products. There was a lot of churn about getting products delivered on time, but it was still focused on one place. But as we begin to move out of Afghanistan, and start to look at other places in the world where we might go, commanders and soldiers have become accustomed to a level of fidelity of data that we or the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have produced over Afghanistan and Iraq. With the need to fight and win in a complex environment, which is where the Army is moving, how do you do that—especially with a poten-tially smaller force? We are really trying to line up what we are doing behind the Army’s 20 warfighting challenges, and you can find geospatial in just about all of them.

One [challenge] in particular is the idea of improving situa-tional understanding, for example in megacities. A large percent-age of the world’s population is moving toward coastal cities. Right now, there are about 20 megacities on the globe, and by 2025 there could be 40. So we’re congratulating ourselves over what we have done with the BuckEye program, with its high-resolution imagery and 1 meter post spacing. That’s an improvement over what we saw in the past, and it has served us well in Afghanistan and Iraq. But if you are going to have to fight in that kind of environment, you’re going to need an even greater fidelity of data. We’re focusing a lot of our effort, especially in research and development, on that chal-lenge. Also, the more fidelity of data, the larger the data sets, and

with current technology, the greater the bandwidth. So there are real challenges, not only in finding ways to create the data and gen-erating technological solutions to manage it, but also shipping it around and visualizing it. I think the biggest challenge for us right now is looking out beyond the POM to 2025 and beyond, and decid-ing what sort of things we should be working on now so that they are delivered in that timeframe.

Q: How would you assess the current state of the AGE?

A: We have an implementation timeline, which looks at the differ-ent components of the AGE and is tied to the Common Operating Environment (COE) versioning. We have to get out to Versions 3 or 4 before we start to realize the full implementation of a Standard and Shareable Geospatial Foundation (SSGF). There are a lot of activities that are currently taking place, with things like common map widgets and application programming interfaces and an initial map foundation. We see the AGE capabilities continuing to move forward through the COE cross-cutting capability (CCC)—SSGF, defining the open geospatial standards and data models required to enable geospatial interoperability within and across the com-puting environments. We also see Distributed Common Ground Systems-Army (DCGS-A) as integral system to the success of the SSGF. DCGS-A has a capability production document that says it’s going to serve as the geospatial foundation provider to other mis-sion command systems, so we see full implementation somewhere


around 2019 or 2020, based on where the COE is right now. We’re at the initial operational capability stage right now, doing manual data load and basic network services.

We think that Version 2, which is scheduled for around fiscal year 2016, is where we’ll see common map widgets and the ini-tial common map and foundation, and some intermediate network services to get to something approaching full operational capabil-ity, with seamless geospatial interoperability, geospatial capabilities brought out to the tactical edge and enterprise access to network services. We’ll be able to synchronize data and have a common map and foundation for everyone somewhere around Version 3 or 4 of the COE. That’s where we project it now, based on current design and funding, but it’s all subject to change. If programs of record take a hit, that will certainly impact how far we go.

Q: What have you accomplished so far on the AGE?

A: We’ve got about six things that we are looking to do, such as develop the Army geospatial architecture. To this point, we’ve done the geospatial reference architecture for the COE and the initial load for SSGF, and are developing the imagery intelligence archi-tecture. The second goal is to develop and recommend standards and data models for the COE. We’ve developed standard geospatial data models, and we were the driving force on the development and approval of an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard, which we call GeoPackage, for handheld devices. The thing that’s unique about it is that if you have multiple geospatial applications on a handheld device, right now you have to store that data in formats that support each one of the applications. So if you have six appli-cations on a handheld that all require geospatial data, you might have to store that data six different ways. With the limitations on space and accessibility, you don’t want to do that. So we developed a standard called GeoPackage in coordination with the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) and GRL, and it has already gone through the OGC.

We continue to provide systems engineering support to the COE, the computing environment (CE) leads and the PMs. We’re leading a couple of COE geospatial crosscutting capabilities, such as the SSGF, the common overlay and common track protocol. The purpose of the geospatial CCCs is to ensure that we do not build stovepipes within the computing environments, but understand that geospatial in a cloud might be implemented differently than on a mobile device, yet still needs to be interoperable. We’re also con-tinuing to conduct value engineering and trade studies to optimize technology investments. There are a lot of different globe technol-ogies and viewers out there, but which ones make the most sense and are most supportive of Army programs? We’re also working with the computing environments to develop roadmaps to imple-ment COE guidance on the AGE. We continue to provide AGE sup-port to the Army’s Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) through systems engineering support, integration, training and installation support to that activity. We provide content management of the geospatial data that is being used in the NIE, as well as modeling and simulation data base support. We’ve been building correlated databases that can be used in the virtual constructive environment out there. We also have some responsibilities for helping with the evaluation process.

We provide test and certification support, so one of the things we are doing is developing a test and certification process in

coordination with the Army chief information officer G/6, the assis-tant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology (ASA (ALT)) and NGA that supports the testing and certification from a geospatial perspective of systems that consume and create geospatial information. Finally, we are coordinating Army external geospatial interfaces. The bottom line is that for systems that use or produce geospatial information, we want to make sure that they are in compliance with the standards that have been established by the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG). We’re also making sure that NSG capabilities are aligned with Army GEOINT capabilities so we don’t have gaps.

One of the things we’ve had success with is in its infant stages. We partnered with the ERDC of the Corps of Engineers, using some of their research funding to establish an Army Geospatial Enterprise node. This is a physical instantiation of the COE here within the AGC. It’s being done in conjunction with the GRL and ERDC’s IT lab. The goal is to represent the COE CEs with repre-sentative systems, either hardware, software or both. Currently, we have systems provided by the program managers representing the data center, command post, mounted computing, mobile handheld and sensor CEs. The idea is that we will provide an environment for experimentation where researchers can integrate their R&D efforts to better ensure transition and interoperability. Someone may come in with a tactical decision aid, so we see if it actually works on the system and meets the program’s requirement, and whether we get the same result throughout the enterprise.

You might have technology that could tell you, based on your location and surrounding environments, where others could hear you from to help you determine your avenue of approach, for exam-ple. The product’s output is published to an open standard, but is represented and visualized differently on different Army systems. Each one of those Army systems implemented that open standard, but not consistently. People always assume that if you provide a list of standards to programs and they implement them, you automati-cally have interoperability. The truth is that it is extremely impor-tant to provide implementation guidance along with the standards to ensure consistent implementation.

Q: What role do you see for a Standard and Shareable Geospatial Foundation, and how are you working to bring it about?

A: The SSGF is imagery, digital maps, topographic feature data, and elevation data in a common set of foundation data that we want to see created, discoverable, published and consumed through a set of clearly defined standards. The idea is that everyone has the same information packaged in the same way. One of the things we’ve done is to propagate what we initially called an Army Geospatial Data Model, which is a way of organizing in vessels the data that is collected. It’s modeled after NGA’s Topographic Feature Data Management program, and is a series of extensions to it that are Army-unique. We’re capturing data using the same terminology and lexicons, so that a bridge is a bridge, and the classification of a bridge is captured in the same way. By including features and attri-butes required by the Marine Corps, it has now become the Ground Warfighter Geospatial Data Model. The idea is that you collect data once and share it seamlessly echelon to echelon and peer to peer. A GEOINT cell on a wide-area surveillance or security mission, which owns the ground for 12 months and has built, updated and man-aged a geospatial database over time with foundational data from


NGA, us or the unit that was there before, has a set of data. We want them to collect their data and format it in a standard way so that it can be shared just the way that NGA data would be shared because it’s built to a standard.

Q: Looking at the Army’s experience in Afghanistan, what lessons have been learned about the use of GEOINT in ground operations?

A: One of the things we’ve learned is that we need to eliminate stovepipes, so that we’re not collecting data in a proprietary way, and so that when programs of record decide that they need a geo-spatial component, they will use open standards rather than turn-ing it over to a contractor and letting them build something proprietary. We have systems that sit next to each other in com-mand posts but can’t share data because their data has to be con-verted to a proprietary format in order to be used. The problem is that your data is only as good as the last time a field service repre-sentative updated your boxes. We see DCGS-A as being the hub for managing, updating and providing updates to mission command systems so that everyone has the same data and in a much more timely manner. It may look different on a handheld device than on a mounted system, but the currency, accuracy and data are all the same, so everyone is operating off the same geospatial foundation.

We need to continue to ‘skinny down’ all the different view-ers, schemas and standards to a point where the data is digest-ible. We need to facilitate relief-in-place transfer of authority, so that when a unit inherits a geospatial database, they are inherit-ing something they understand and subscribe to. The first 90 days in a combat environment are the most dangerous because you are new and still learning, and you haven’t figured out how to operate in that environment yet. You can reduce that risk level by having a strong set of data that everyone subscribes to and understands. In the past, a unit would replace another unit that had collected data in a way that it didn’t understand or trust. You have to find a way to do that.

The direction that we’re going is the virtualization of IT, towards serving capabilities as web services instead of as stand-alone pro-grams. Look at the Situational Awareness Geospatially Enabled tool, which leverages the COTS software model builder and script-ing language. So you’re taking advantage of something you have a certificate of networthiness and authority to operate for, and aren’t using a new technology that has to go through software blocking and other processes that impact the programs’ cost and schedule.

There is also going to be a continued demand for a capability for commanders to map their own battlespace. BuckEye is one solu-tion, but not the only one. With the emphasis on being an expedi-tionary Army, able to go into new environments and be agile and mobile, you have to be able to put more into the hands of com-manders to ensure they have more situational awareness. That just cries out for a high-fidelity data set, which we’ve become accus-tomed to.

The other thing to think about, as we continue to engage in counterterrorism activities, is how to partner with other nations, perhaps in the Third World, that want to join us in that fight. In addition, if you want to introduce a nation to democratic processes with representational government, you have to know where peo-ple live and have an addressing index. It all starts with a map. If you want to introduce a 911 system, you have to have an address-ing index. Mapping and GIS technology also open up other parts

of a nation’s government and society, and can be used as a tool for global engagement.

Q: Among AGC’s many programs, what are some recent initiatives that you would like to highlight and bring to greater attention in the military and intelligence communities?

A: We have a systems and acquisition support directorate that pro-vides a lot of GEOINT systems support to ASA (ALT). We build geo-spatial systems, provide systems support to programs of record and do enterprise development. But that organization also has a Civil Applications Branch, which is not as well-known. We don’t have a large civil works program at AGC, but there are a couple of things that people may not be as aware of. For the Corps of Engineers, we are the survey, engineering and mapping tactical center of exper-tise. We provide technical, operational and management support of geospatial data and standards to a number of civil works programs, including a national inventory of dams and electronic navigation charts. We’re doing work on a comprehensive evaluation of sea-level changes that could affect corps projects, and we have worked with the civil works program to develop archival and retrieval tools. We also have responsibility for the spatial data standards for the facil-ity/infrastructure environment, which are used by the installation management community. We’re normally focused on support to the warfighter, but we have a civil works program that, while small, is important to the nation. O


The recent selection by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency of a broker to coordinate with develop-ers of mobile applications, as well as the upcoming launch of a new version of its original app store, represent impor-tant steps forward in the agency’s ongoing campaign to put GEOINT power in the hands of users, wherever they are.

The drive for mobile apps, launched by recently retired Director Letitia A. Long, has been under way for a few years, with the agency establishing its first app store, such as those available to consumers from Apple and Google, in 2012.

App stores allow developers to have their wares quickly reviewed and offered and enable device users to easily and quickly download and use the software. That’s the kind of innovation that NGA is now pursuing.

“This has been in the works for a couple of years now, ever since the agency’s director articulated a vision of put-ting geospatial intelligence in the hands of the customer.

The director wanted to go from virtually all applications being developed in-house to a situation where 75 percent comes from outside,” said Joedy Saffel, chief of the Xperience Design Office in NGA’s Xperience Directorate.

To make that happen, however, NGA needed a mecha-nism that would remove the barriers between the agency and the developer community, bypassing cumbersome and time-consuming federal acquisitions regulations more suited for weapons systems than for relatively small pieces of software.

“We recognized that these developers were often inde-pendent small businesses and individuals in academia, and we realized that we had to start doing business with them in a new way,” said Saffel. “We also wanted to pay for the apps in a different manner, going to a commercial consumer-driven model of paying for usage rather than paying up front for development work and maintenance and updating forever.”

wItH a new Broker and app store, nGa moves aHead wItH a CampaIGn to put moBIle GeoInt power In tHe Hands oF users.

Apps to GoBy peter BuxBaum

GIF Correspondent


“My group prototyped what became the app store,” said Ben Tuttle, head of NGA’s mobile apps team. “We saw what Apple and Google were doing and thought that if we could put our special sauce around those kinds of app stores that would satisfy our security and policy needs, we could build a ver-sion of an app store for NGA that would span all of the security domains.”

“NGA is in a very advantageous position to sup-port the Department of Defense and intelligence community on a variety of missions,” said Saffel. “But we didn’t have a good mechanism to take advantage of innovations in the app development community over the last 10 years. It’s not a seg-ment that NGA did business with on a day-to-day basis.”

Combined with the development of the app store, NGA also initiated an Applications Operations Services Provider (AOSP) contract to serve as a broker between the agency and developers, and awarded it to TASC in September. The potential four-year, $25 million contract award was sub-sequently protested by an unsuccessful bidder, however, and awaits a ruling by the Government Accountability Office.

“AOSP is intended to answer the problem of how to access app developers and how to remove the barriers to their entry into business with NGA,” said Saffel.

“Demand for mobile apps is being generated at the warfighter level,” said A.J. Clark, president of Thermopylae, a developer of mobile apps and plat-forms. “The armed services are doing everything from responding to humanitarian crises to sup-porting combat operations around the world. The mobile piece of this was born out of the increasingly expeditionary nature of military activities.”

Besides NGA, other military organizations, including the Army Geospatial Center (AGC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have also conducted projects designed to marry the geospatial with mobile.

“AOSP was a good idea,” said Tom Suder, president of Mobilegov. “Having the AOSP contractor broker the development of apps is innovative, the first of its kind in the federal govern-ment. AOSP will allow NGA to take advantage of technology devel-opments outside of the Washington, D.C., ecosystem. Many of the prime developers around the capital still do most of their devel-opment work for the web. Mobile apps have to be developed fresh from the ground up. You can’t just put a website on a phone.”

provIsIonInG Controls

Version 2.0 of the NGA app store, about to be launched under Saffel’s leadership, seeks to resolve a number of issues raised by the initial version. “The initial app store did not answer the need to manage apps in the three security classifications plus the unclas-sified,” said Saffel. “We also wanted to have a dashboard so that we could segment users and understand who was using the apps, where we were succeeding with the apps and where we were not.”

The store also needed provisioning controls so that the apps could be downloaded only by those who required it for their missions and tasks, espe-cially if the app was expensive to download.

“If there was a fee associated with the app, we didn’t want everyone to be able to download it,” said Saffel. “So if it was an aeronautical app, we wanted to make it available only to those associated with an aeronautical mission. There are also monitor-ing, feedback and ratings mechanisms in the new version. There are a lot more robust capabilities in version 2.0.”

As far as the apps themselves go, users have demanded that the apps work while the devices that are carrying them are disconnected from the net-work. “They want to be able to use the apps when there are no comms available to reach back to a server, when they are not good enough to move data around, or when the user just doesn’t trust the comms,” said Tuttle. “We are developing apps that push what data we can to the device. The user can make use of that data until connected back to the network.”

These disconnected apps present a challenge, however, because of the limited data storage capac-ity on user devices. NGA has partnered up with AGC to develop a single geospatial data standard for use on mobile devices, thus reducing duplication of data. The standard also enhances data interopera-bility among systems and devices.

The functionalities represented by the apps cur-rently running on the store include the range of productivity applications as well as more tactical functions. The latter includes apps that can calcu-late lines of sight, as well as automated and interac-tive versions of the paper map books that NGA and

its predecessors have produced for years. “It’s not just a change in the mode of delivery,” said Tuttle.

“There is also the processing of a back-end workflow to get a digi-tal rather than a paper product to the end-user. This disconnected app provides an experience as if the device were connected to the Internet, with the ability to zoom in and out and to perform other such functions.”

Another NGA app, due for release soon, will provide a data-base with information on how and where ships are attacked on open waters. “The database gives access to attacks on ships of any shipping method anywhere in the world. The data is downloaded ahead on the device and the user can query the data to see on a map the time, as well as the location of attacks filtered by time,” said Tuttle.

NGA is currently developing an application that will allow users to create reports from the field using data preloaded onto the device. “A user can create an observation on the device, and when the device is connected it will automatically shoot the report up to the operations center. Anyone else connected on a mobile device can then see it,” Tuttle explained.

App store users have primarily been from DoD, the intelli-gence community and the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

A.J. Clark

Ben Tuttle

Tom Suder


payment plans

The idea of bringing a private-sector broker into the picture was designed to make life easier for both users and developers, according to Suder. “Users can go through the broker, saying, ‘I need a certain capability. Find me someone who can provide it,’” he said. “Companies that want to post apps to the store need to develop a relationship with one company.”

Mobilegov is on the TASC team awarded the AOSP contract.The AOSP contractor is also responsible for providing over-

all governance to the app store, including the vetting of pro-posed apps for efficacy and for any intellectual property issues, noted Saffel.

With the app store, NGA is also trying to move from a tra-ditional software development model to one in which the devel-opers would be paid per use. At first, NGA will be paying for the downloads, having shifted funds from traditional software development activities to this project. At some point in the future, an alternative will be found to NGA footing the entire bill, Saffel predicted.

One problem raised by NGA’s payment plan is whether it will provide sufficient incentive for developers to create apps for the store. “In the commercial world, app developers are hoping to have their product downloaded by tens of millions of people,” said Clark. “NGA apps may be downloaded by a few thousand. Apps are going to require a lot of tailoring to be suitable for the NGA environment.”

Additionally, the app itself represents just the tip of the ice-berg when it comes to delivering functionality to users, noted Clark. “The back end is truly expensive. Google Earth and Google Maps, for example, need to reach back to Google enterprise ser-vices. Imagery routing requires an entire service to support. It is even more complex and challenging when you are talking about an app store for U.S. government geospatial applications. NGA, or some other government organization, is going to have to provide the necessary enterprise services.”

“We know that we are different from the commercial market-place,” said Saffel. “We are not going to be dealing with millions of downloads. We have been talking about this pricing scheme since early on, and we want our store to be attractive to private app developers.”

Whether the NGA app store can be made attractive to com-mercial app developers is dependent on a number of factors, including whether many of the apps to be offered will be versions of previously existing commercial apps.

“Many commercial apps may not take too much modifica-tion to make them usable in our marketplace,” said Saffel. “Some things out there may be suitable for our marketplace and won’t require start-from-scratch development, so we may be in a posi-tion to add a new market for these developers.”

Another idea is that some of the potential developers for the store will not be looking for money as their primary reward. “There may be grad students who have some expertise at build-ing apps,” said Saffel. “Deploying their apps to our store could be a success story for them, something to put on their resumes. We have engaged with the developer community, received a lot of feedback, and we believe there is interest out there.”

Some larger developers may decide not to play in this market, thereby opening more opportunities for smaller firms.

Furthermore, Saffel envisions a pricing plan in which value is not merely calculated by the number of downloads. “We want to be more sophisticated than that. Some apps may be downloaded only 10 times, but could have the potential to add tremendous value to missions. Others may be downloaded 15,000 times but provide only basic functionality. The number of downloads is just one variable when comes to understanding the value of mobile apps,” he said.

In addition, all download revenues will go directly to develop-ers. The AOSP contractor will be paid separately, and not based on the number of app downloads.

smart apps

Besides looking at the security and policy attributes of indi-vidual apps, Clark sees the necessity for the app store manager to focus on the holistic environment.

“You don’t want to end up with 5,000 apps doing the same thing,” he said. “The focus should be on getting information to where it is needed, when it is needed. Apps should be evaluated on whether they complement each other. NGA should encourage the development of what we call smart apps.”

Smart apps are those that have the capability of communicat-ing with each other. “Reports from one app can be made available and used in another app. Users of other apps can be alerted to the availability of this information. This is already a key component of desktop military systems, and military users are accustomed to that kind of functionality,” Clark noted.

“It is an interesting model NGA is pursuing,” said Suder. “Having developers interface with a private-sector contractor act-ing as a buffer between the developers and the agency is an agile way to go about it. It avoids the time and the paperwork involved in following standard federal acquisition practices or getting on a GSA schedule. Applications can be developed and posted quickly to answer user needs once the security standards have been met. NGA is leading the way in this area and others are looking into it. We’ll have to see how it goes.”

“I think NGA is championing a move in the right direction,” said Clark. “Many developers are now focusing on mobile first when they develop new applications. They are no longer going first to the web. The fact that NGA is pushing this model within the federal government is very commendable.”

“I have no doubt that in the commercial sector there is a solu-tion to just about every technological need we have. This is about changing the way we do business. We are focusing on something different. We are looking to change the way we acquire software,” said Saffel.

“This is a real game changer. We are out in front of the race with this app store and we have a contract with governance pro-cesses in place that ensures that everything we have out there meets the proper standards for NGA and for our customers,” he added. O




Much like their gas-sipping automotive counterparts, hybrid clouds are reshaping the competitive market to provide cloud computing capabilities to the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

The potential market is huge, with the $1.7 billion in federal government spending on cloud services this year expected to rise to $9 billion by 2017. Moreover, federal IT executives are increasingly seeing a hybrid approach as a transformational asset that can help manage applications, data and data services residing on different platforms.

The IBM Center for Applied Insights pre-dicts that by 2015, nearly 75 percent of large enterprises will have hybrid clouds.

A hybrid cloud is defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a composition of two or more clouds (on-site private, on-site community, off-site private, off-site community or pub-lic) that remain as distinct entities but are bound together by standardized or proprie-tary technology that enables data and appli-cation portability. A hybrid cloud integrates cloud services, utilizing both private and public clouds to perform distinct functions within the same enterprise/agency.

Public cloud computing is most often associated with multitenant services and few, if any, owned assets by the service buyer. It offers cost efficiencies and higher IT value, but also comes with far less con-trol over the IT provisioning. Private clouds, on the other hand, involve more direct control over IT resources, such as infra-structure, operations and management oversight, and the IT services are provided to defined players.

“Government clouds are a type of private cloud,” remarked Dave McClure, chief strat-egist for the Veris Group. “Agencies may set them up to provide common infrastructure or enterprise software services to organiza-tions within a single department or agency, or a cloud solution provider (CSP) restricts the cloud services to government entities because of unique security, policy or con-tractual needs specific to federal or state and local governments.”

Cost/Control BalanCe

Consequently, hybrid cloud operating environments are gaining popularity as both public and private entities gain experience

with balancing costs and value against a desired degree of system and data controls.

“For example, many federal agencies use public cloud infrastructure to host cit-izen-facing informational websites, run software development/testing platforms prior to moving operational environ-ments or serve as optional data backup sites for data center disaster recovery,” explained McClure. “Their primary mission or business computing needs may still be housed in agency-owned and/or operated systems environments.”

Since all cloud computing services offer efficiencies to differing degrees, public cloud services are likely to be more cost-efficient and scalable than private clouds, accord-ing to Michael Shepherd, senior business development manager, public sector cloud for Cisco.

“Therefore, an organization can maxi-mize efficiencies by employing public cloud services for all non-sensitive operations and relying on a private cloud for mission-critical or core applications,” Shepherd said.

To gain greater computing efficiencies, some organizations may move data out-side their own operating environments into

usInG BotH CommerCIal and prIvate Clouds enaBles aGenCIes to BalanCe Costs and value wItH seCurIty and Control. By karen e. tHuermer, GIF Correspondent

Hybrid Vigor


secure cloud platforms where data analysis can be performed more quickly and cheaply using modern hardware and software com-puting capacities.

“Moreover, common shared services for finance, payroll and human resources management may be conducted in mult-itenant government cloud environments run by agencies or commercial CSPs,” McClure added.

McClure emphasized, however, that a common shortcoming in hybrid cloud envi-ronments is that there is not enough under-standing and explanation of how their cloud offering is physically and logically separated from internal agency or corporate CSP IT infrastructure.

“Fortunately, the FedRAMP PMO has provided guidance and utilizes a table to define the system interconnections,” he said. A CSP must provide additional infor-mation to explain how the agency or its own corporate infrastructure is properly secured and segmented and logically communicates with their FedRAMP cloud solution.

The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) is the result of a close collaboration with cyberse-curity and cloud experts from GSA, NIST, the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, NSA, OMB, the Federal CIO Council and its working groups, as well as private industry. It is managed by the FedRAMP Program Management Office (PMO).

It servICes manaGement

To operate a hybrid cloud, agencies need an integrated orchestration and automa-tion platform that can extend management and governance across the two distinct domains—public and private.

“This requires a means of integrating IT services management (ITSM) across mul-tiple service providers, including internal IT services organizations, as well as a com-munications infrastructure that supports rapid and efficient movement of data and workloads between the various clouds in the hybrid environment,” reported Chris Smith, vice president of technology for AT&T Government Solutions.

In addition to having strong native ITSM practices, such as configuration, change and incident management, the cloud ser-vice provider must deliver electronic and operations interfaces that support cross-organization ITSM.

“The ability to exchange data and commands for configuration, status, per-formance, and incident management is essential to efficient hybrid cloud manage-ment,” stressed Smith.

The hybrid cloud operator, such as DoD, must also have a means of combining these disparate service monitoring and control channels into a unified management capa-bility, typically through a cloud service bro-ker, he noted. “A robust network is needed to move data and workloads between the various clouds in the hybrid environment.”

Ideally, a common, scalable network is used to tie the clouds into a unified IT services environment, allowing clouds to join and leave the environment as needed. “The network should scale to deliver band-width on demand to support cloud bursting, disaster recovery and workload manage-ment activities, and be able to do this at the same tempo as the individual clouds in the hybrid environment,” Smith added.

With DoD’s definition of the CSM and growing support from industry, the mil-itary will be able to take advantage of a growing number of opportunities to lever-age hybrid cloud solutions. Traditional use cases for hybrid cloud solutions will provide the military with similar benefits to those realized in the private sector.

These use cases include storing and processing sensitive data in-house while assigning less sensitive workloads to exter-nal resources; employing cloud bursting to accommodate overflow demand when tem-porary capacity needs cannot be satisfied by in-house resources; using a combination of in-house and external resources to improve overall disaster recovery capabilities; and transferring workloads to specifically tuned resource pools, such as big data analytics or virtual desktop infrastructure.

platForm oFFerInGs

AT&T recently launched its AT&T Synaptic Storage as a Service (STaaS) for Government, a multitenant, community cloud offer. According to Smith, it offers the same features, policies, capabilities and EMC Atmos technology (a cloud storage ser-vices platform developed by EMC Corp.) that AT&T’s commercial cloud storage offers, but adds expanded security measures.

“The AT&T Synaptic StaaS for Government platform is a FedRAMP-accredited cloud offer that is limited to federal, state, local and tribal government

customers,” Smith explained. “AT&T STaaS for Government is currently in-process for DoD CSM for Impact Level 2” to receive pre-liminary approval to operate.

AT&T Government Cloud powered by CSC provides multitenant cloud comput-ing infrastructure services with disaster recovery capabilities for the same set of government tenants as Synaptic StaaS for Government. “It is currently undergoing FedRAMP assessment and accreditation as a moderate-impact system,” he added.

In August, AT&T and VMware announced that they are delivering highly secure, flex-ible-bandwidth, low-latency private cloud network connectivity. This involved an agreement signed by VMware with AT&T to join the AT&T NetBond ecosystem.

“This agreement will allow customers to use VMware’s public cloud services over their AT&T virtual private network (VPN),” Smith said. “We expect to roll out services in the first half of 2015.”

AT&T NetBond uses patented AT&T technology that enables seamless integra-tion of a customer’s AT&T multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) VPN with cloud ser-vices such as AT&T Compute as a Service (CaaS) and a growing ecosystem of third-party CSP offerings.

“This solution enables the cloud to appear as another endpoint on the custom-er’s MPLS VPN network, making the cloud computing resource accessible to any other customer site on its VPN, without the need to use the Internet,” Smith said.

Advantages of this approach include enterprise-wide application of security, thereby avoiding routing traffic over the public Internet; an extension of the secu-rity characteristics of the MPLS Private Network into the cloud; superior network performance, with as much as 50 per-cent lower latency and up to three times greater availability; built-in elasticity that saves customers as much as 60 per-cent on networking costs; and “pre-inte-grated” cloud-in-the-network speed times to provision.

“Security standards for government and military customers are rightfully high,” remarked Smith. “As a result, any offer-ing to the federal sector needs to lead with security.”

Consequently, AT&T’s Synaptic Storage as a Service for Government includes storage towers that are physically sepa-rated from other users’ towers in the data center and a separate logical cloud for


government data. Government customer data will not coexist with commercial data, and there is a separate cloud portal parti-tion for government agencies.

“All government agency customers and their authorized users are assigned RSA hard tokens for two-factor authentication,” Smith added.

Also critical to the viability of cloud ser-vices to military customers is the perfor-mance and availability of the service.

“At AT&T, we understand that while this includes our data centers and associ-ated IT infrastructure, it must also extend to the connectivity between data centers and our customers,” Smith said. “Our NetBond strategy allows AT&T to deliver our own cloud services as well as those from a growing ecosystem of partners as if the cloud services were a part of our customers’ VPNs.”

Smith calls this a unique offering that provides network-enabled cloud services with improved security, higher perfor-mance, increased flexibility and lower cost than previously available.

unIFIed arCHIteCture

The Cisco Unified Data Center (UDC) is “a simplified architecture that pro-vides more efficient network operations, delivers greater IT agility, and incorpo-rates an open system for supporting mul-tiple cloud and virtualization strategies,” Shepherd explained.

Cisco’s UDC architecture has three main components: Unified Fabric, which is based on the Nexus family of switches and integrated network services that provide high-speed connectivity, high availability, security and consistent quality of experi-ence for data center applications; Unified Computing System (UCS), which provides a single, open and programmable man-agement interface that can scale to hun-dreds of blades and thousands of virtual machines, and deliver a unified operational model across physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures; and Unified Management, which allows transparent management across physical and virtual resources to sim-plify and accelerate delivery of IT services

within the data center and/or in a cloud environment.

“This solution includes Cisco UCS Manager, which provides centralized and embedded management of all computing hardware and software components, and Cisco Network Services Manager, which provides fast and automatic provisioning and deployment of various network com-ponents. It also contains Cisco’s Intelligent Automation for Cloud, which provides the functions to support an IT service catalog, self-service provisioning, automation and orchestration, while also supporting het-erogeneous IT environments and offering sophisticated service management func-tions such as policy-based governance, ser-vice assurance, life-cycle management and pay-per-use tracking,” Shepherd explained.

Cisco offers a full suite of cloud solu-tions (private, hosted, managed and/or public) and enablement services to public-sector organizations.

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government entities optimize their cur-rent environments, leverage multiple cloud resources and manage workloads within their own data center assets and across hybrid environments,” Shepherd said. “The end goal would be to accelerate the provi-sioning of workloads, improve end-to-end visibility across the world of many clouds, and ultimately improve customer satisfac-tion and confidence.”

The open-source software company SUSE, meanwhile, provides an enterprise OpenStack distribution that enables the rapid deployment and easy management of highly available, mixed-hypervisor private cloud environments. SUSE also works with CSPs to ensure that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is broadly available for use by gov-ernment employees deploying applications and workloads in the public cloud.

“CSPs we work with include Amazon Web Services (AWS), including the AWS GovCloud, Microsoft Azure and HP,” com-mented Doug Jarvis, cloud solutions man-ager at SUSE.

“In addition, SUSE Studio simplifies the creation of standard images and applica-tions and quickly deploys these workloads directly into their private cloud or into their public cloud,” he continued. “And SUSE Manager can patch, update, configure and monitor at-scale Linux workloads running on-premise or in the cloud, ensuring the security and compliance of all workloads.”

SUSE has developed an ecosystem of government-certified partners that can help set up clouds, integrate with exist-ing operations and move workloads to the cloud.

“We work with these partners to implement SUSE Cloud as part of their broader cloud offerings,” reported Jarvis. “SUSE Cloud is highly flexible and can be easily delivered as part of the partner’s cloud solution.”

Its cloud supports mixed virtual envi-ronments such as KVM, Xen, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, enabling government agency and military IT staff to maximize performance and optimize hypervisor licensing costs for cloud work-loads. In addition, SUSE Cloud uses the open APIs of OpenStack to enable the seam-less integration of third-party software.

“This enables government and military users to add additional software solutions for security and identity to their cloud as well as leverage the storage and network-ing solutions that they are accustomed

to using as part of their data center,” Jarvis explained. “Because of our extensive OpenStack and computing infrastructure knowledge, we work closely with our gov-ernment partners during the design and implementation of the cloud to ensure a smooth delivery.”

seCurIty and GovernanCe

As with the entire cloud field, hybrid computing faces a plethora of challenges. Topping the list of concerns are adequate security and privacy along with cloud gov-ernance and compliance.

“Never forget the network,” Smith said. “Getting to the cloud reliably and securely is just as important as the cloud platform itself. That is, the network mat-ters. As we see it, only by owning and managing both a wireless and wireline/IP network can a provider truly deliver the best end-to-end cloud solution, whether they are connecting to the cloud platform wirelessly via a mobile device, or wired with a PC or thin/zero client device.”

The FedRAMP program has established stringent baseline standards for cloud secu-rity assessments done at the low and mod-erate risk levels. “In addition, to ensure quality and consistency, FedRAMP accred-its independent, third-party assessment organizations that test and evaluate cloud security offerings against these standards. DoD has embraced the baseline and aug-mented it with additional security controls specific for its higher-risk-level environ-ments,” McClure commented.

Beyond security, McClure identi-fies change management as a huge chal-lenge. “Cloud computing services move IT procurement and acquisition away from buying physical products to pur-chasing common IT services that are measured and ordered to agreed-upon standards,” he said. “It requires the gov-ernment IT workforce to become knowl-edgeable about the advantages, risks and mitigations associated with cloud services implementation approaches.”

IT and non-IT staffs have to understand that truly benefiting from cloud requires a change in business processes, Jarvis noted. “The on-demand, self-service nature of a cloud changes the dynamics of this rela-tionship and opens up the question of how IT personnel can ensure compliance and security in this new world,” he said. “SUSE Studio and SUSE Manager can help from

a technical standpoint to standardize the image build process and ensure that all workloads running in the cloud are secure and compliant. However, we find that SUSE and its partners need to work closely to help define how the cloud will be used and adjust processes accordingly.”

SUSE and its partners also spend a lot of time working with customers in identifying the use cases and applications that should run in the cloud.

“Not all workloads need to or should move to the cloud,” Jarvis remarked. “Given regulatory, security and compliance requirements, as well as the design and usage patterns of certain applications, it may make more sense to keep them out of the cloud; others make more sense to run in a private rather than a public cloud to ensure that the data is controlled inside the firewall.”

For instance, legacy applications are probably best left outside of the cloud. “While batch and data process-ing applications are ideal private cloud use cases where you want extra security, the servers are needed frequently and on-demand, but can be de-provisioned until they are needed again,” he added. “And then development and testing of less important applications can be done in a public cloud where you don’t want to utilize internal resources.”

Skills development is also of critical importance for both cloud administrators and cloud users. Cloud computing is still relatively new, and training staff is not only important for the implementation and management of the cloud, but also to ensure that once implemented, the cloud is actually used.

“In the past year, we have found that government data center consolidation is taking a different dimension,” Jarvis com-mented. “Cloud computing is enabling government agencies to become cloud ser-vice providers for other agencies. However, while the government may achieve increased economies of scale, military branches and individual agencies have their own unique computing requirements and don’t necessarily need a one-size-fits-all cloud environment.” O

For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.

com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.


Compiled by KMI Media Group staffGIF RESOURCE CENTER

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Q: What user scenarios (use cases) do you envision for 3-D technology, for example, in the defense/law enforcement and commercial fields?

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We’ve also talked with a number of commercial firms about applying 3-D imaging to surveying, infrastructure monitoring and asset management. The modeling and simulation community can also benefit from rapid 3-D mod-eling to get current, realistic terrain and structures into their “fly-through/walk-through” scenarios. Going for-ward, we plan to expand our 3-D capa-bilities to address the use cases we expect to emerge from the growing avail-ability of near real-time imaging from space, where we see a demand for near real-time 3-D digital surface models. Working through the bandwidth chal-lenges is always in the forefront of our technologists’ minds.

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