COPs and the City

Written by Mark Reichardt

URBAN MODELING STANDARDS ARE ESSENTIAL
FOR  CREATING AN EFFECTIVE COMMON OP RATING
PICTURE FOR OPERATIONS IN BUILT-UP AREAS.

In defense, disaster management and emergency management, coordination among teams and individuals requires a common operating picture (COP). Integration, fusion and application of information coming from multiple sources, such as digital maps, overhead images, head-mounted imaging systems, sensors and verbal reports, is the key to providing an up-to-date COP that informs each participant.

This bringing together of different kinds of information from different systems requires that the systems “speak the same language” in system terms. That is, the systems must use common interfaces and encodings.

Much of the information about actors, events and environment in a COP involves location, so one key requirement for communication is a set of open standards geospatial interfaces and encodings that enable communication of points, areas, spatial relationships and spatial processing instructions.

Much of the standards work necessary for getting the big geographic picture has already been done. Working with industry, government and other standards development organizations, the membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has created 28 open geospatial Web services standards. These OGC standards, implemented in products from system, component and data vendors, enable the necessary interoperability for Earth imaging, street map and topographic map display, location services and so on.

But this level of detail is not always sufficient in providing intelligence for operations that go between and inside buildings, operations that require detailed information about building interiors and surfaces, and about the close-up details of physical infrastructure such as bridges, airports, and “pipes and wires.” Meeting this requirement is currently one of the main goals of the OGC.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES

The defense and homeland security technology communities are keenly interested in new technologies for creating geospatial data that is actionable for soldiers and first responders on the move in urban environments.

Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) is an increasingly important data source. LiDAR’s rapid vertically oriented optical measurements can provide high-resolution building footprints, roof heights and roof slopes, day or night. LiDAR can also be aimed at an angle or used from the ground to provide detailed side views and measurements of structures. But there are often manual steps required to identify objects represented in this data.

In addition to LiDAR, as the speed and resolution of digital scanning devices improves along with the power of computers, digital photogrammetry becomes increasingly practical in government and private sector applications to process aerial imagery that provides measurements at accuracies well under a meter. All types of imagery fall under the OGC’s category of “coverage,” and most of the necessary standards are in place for Web-based client/ server operations involving such data, even when these operations must account for the motion of airborne sensor platforms and the intricacies of photogrammetry.

The OGC’s Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) standards are an important means for providing COP detail views. Already adopted by the OGC membership and in use in multiple domains, SWE provides a framework for publishing, discovering, accessing and using real-time sensor and video feeds, both fixed and mobile.

SWE is becoming an important aspect of the IT infrastructure for ocean observation, and is part of the basic framework for NASA’s EO-1 satellite operations. SWE is part of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory SensorNet system of open, standardized sensor interfaces and encodings for enabling effective integration, access, fusion and use of sensor-derived data in critical homeland security applications. SWE standards played a role in the EC09 OGC Pilot, which was part of the 2009 Empire Challenge exercise, providing “plug and play” interoperability in a secure sensor system management environment.

Another obvious source of data is the building-related data—computer-aided design (CAD), text and other data types— that is developed when buildings and capital projects are designed, financed, built, insured, occupied, remodeled and inspected.

Following is information about what must be done to make these kinds of data usable in urban security and intelligence operations.

CITY MODELS

Photographs of cityscapes are useful for some purposes, but the amount of information in a photograph is not sufficient for developing a COP. 3-D models of cities contain additional information not captured in photos, enabling animated digital fly-throughs, but most 3-D models look visually barren and abstract because they include little more than geometry.

Also, 3-D models often don’t include enough information for applications such as floodplain analysis (insufficient elevation data), acoustic analysis (insufficient characterization of surfaces), line-of-sight analysis (insufficiently precise geolocation of building footprints) and analysis of the dispersion of airborne biological threats (difficulty importing multiple 3-D datasets into the dispersion model, or inadequate knowledge of in-building and through-building airflow).

The OGC CityGML standard provides much of what is necessary for these more demanding applications.

CityGML, developed by the German North Rhine Westphalia Sig3D organization and in official use in several cities and regions in Europe, is an OGC standard for structuring and Web-based sharing of urban and landscape information models. CityGML provides the means for applications to manage multiple levels of detail, from terrain to light bulbs. Besides geometry and graphical appearance, it also represents semantic information about the objects.

Advancing CityGML is one goal of the OGC 3-D Information Management Working Group, which focuses on the convergence of CAD, architecture, engineering and construction (AEC), geospatial, 3-D visualization and urban simulation to serve stakeholders engaged in all types of activities related to the built environment.

With enough programming resources, there are always ways to make idiosyncratic types of data and services work in a tightly coupled fashion with other types of data and services to accomplish a specific purpose. But the whole point of standards is to bypass the need for special programming and tight coupling. Standards-based Web services enable loosely coupled interprocess communication. That is, any client that implements an open interface can interact with any server that implements the same interface, just like the millions of HTTP clients and servers that communicate over IP networks.

NEXT STEPS

As mentioned above, LiDAR can provide high-resolution information about buildings, but manual steps are required for the extraction of visible objects. Considerable research is under way to solve the problem of automatic recognition and classification of objects like buildings and trees. The topics are approached from very different disciplines, mostly by researchers from the fields of photogrammetry, computer vision, robotics, engineering surveying, geomatics, and computer-aided architectural design.

Another area in which technology is moving rapidly is indoor location. GPS doesn’t work well inside buildings, but a variety of other location-determination approaches can provide more precise location within a building. As the smart grid advances and as smart buildings proliferate, they will surely communicate with smartphones. Some smartphones already have a compass, and they will soon offer services that will help businesses advertise to passing pedestrians. Commercially motivated technology advances like these will obviously also be useful in defense, intelligence, homeland security and emergency management.

The key issue in building a COP is the ability to fuse data from multiple sources into useful information, and the ability to present that information in a useful way. The same information may need to be presented with different symbologies for different communities. The multisource, multi-INT interoperability provided via OGC standards is in fact enabling the COP to be customized as a user-defined operational picture to meet the specific needs of different players in an operation.

Developers of new technologies usually recognize the value of making their technologies usable within frameworks of standards. But it is also the case that bringing legacy standards, data and systems into the open Web services standards world adds tremendous value to those legacy resources.

The recently completed Architecture, Engineering, Construction, Owner and Operator (AECOO) Testbed, organized by the OGC and the buildingSmart alliance, focused in part on connecting 3-D building models with business processes. The AEC industry, through organizations like the buildingSmart alliance, is moving away from reliance on static 2-D drawings to living 3-D models of a building that will reduce costs and errors over the life cycles of buildings and capital projects such as airports and subways. Multiple participants have access to the data sets, which evolve as the building evolves. This information becomes an essential resource for urban security.

But the task of creating open standards for Web service-based building information models (BIM) is enormous. This testbed helped the AECOO industries prepare to move outdated file-based information management practices and buildingSmart’s filebased industry foundation class standards to an open standards Web services environment, but it was only a first step. Much work remains.

It is in the interest of the defense, intelligence and homeland security communities to coordinate their BIM requirements with industry, standards groups and other government agencies, such as the General Services Administration, that also have a stake in promoting interoperability in building-related application domains. The sooner such coordination reaches critical mass, the sooner there will be improved COPs in defense, disaster management and emergency management. ♦

Mark Reichardt is president and chief executive officer of the Open Geospatial Consortium.

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