Building a Base of GEOINT Standards
INTERAGENCY WORKING GROUP OVERSEES STANDARDS FOR ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES, DATA ARCHITECTURE AND SOFTWARE TOOLS.
Got standards? Recently, GEOINT “standards” have morphed from being a mere “buzz phrase” to a realized vision within the geospatial intelligence community. The need for standards is well understood and is now being taken quite seriously by GEOINT users, decision makers and warfighters.
Consider, for example, that the number of remote sensing collectors being deployed each year is increasing rapidly, and the fidelity and resolution of the imagery being collected is also increasing dramatically. Management of the collection, processing and dissemination of ever-larger volumes of digital data has become daunting. In a world where a single digital image can be multiple gigabytes in size, significant time delays can result as large files are exchanged across networks with various bandwidth capabilities. Often, an entire image must be downloaded when the user needs only a small portion of the imagery coverage.
Enter standards—in this case, the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) 2000 Interactive Protocol (JPIP), which takes full advantage of JPEG 2000’s scalability properties and applies them within a net-centric environment. The JPIP can interactively access and deliver portions of the JPEG 2000 image in essentially arbitrary order, in response to real-time application requests. Typical user actions like zooming and panning are supported dynamically over the network without the need to download the entire image from the repository, improving timely access to the data. Moreover, deployment of this standard gives tremendous mileage to the bandwidth-constrained nature of tactical warfighting environments. This is just one example of why standards have become important to implement and abide by in the Department of Defense community.
To address issues such as these, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s National Center for Geospatial Intelligence Standards (NCGIS) chairs an organization called the Geospatial Intelligence Standards Working Group (GWG), which is aimed at the standards needs of the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) community. The GWG was inaugurated in 2005 to address a myriad of interoperability issues in the DoD and intelligence community, and now runs as a successful forum for expanded standards communication and effort, driving development and eliminating duplication of technologies.
To date, the four military services and nearly every major combat command are actively participating in the GWG. The membership drive continues, recruiting standards experts, acquisition experts, program managers and anyone with a vested interest in GEOINT data or systems standards requirements, implementation and conformance.
“The GWG is an excellent community forum to address GEOINT standards which are foundational to the Net-Enabled Command Capability, the Joint GEOINT Activity [JGA], and the Joint Command and Control Portfolio. Each GWG focus group welcomes broad participation and has helped foster integral relationships between industry, DoD, the intelligence community, and several federal organizations that will greatly benefit the joint warfighter,” said Air Force Captain Robert Hayes (USJFCOM/ J87).
CENTRALIZED DATABASE
The GWG has two primary purposes. First, it serves as a technical working group under DoD’s Information Technology Standards Committee recommending the adoption of standards to the DoD IT Standards Registry (DISR) creating a centralized database to better enable the discovery, access, integration, dissemination, exploitation and interoperability of GEOINT. In March, the NSG released a directive (NSGD ST 8100) mandating that the DISR will be the NSG GEOINT standards registry of record, and the GWG is the means by which to get GEOINT standards approved in the DISR.
Using the DISR online tool (https://disronline.disa.mil), GWG core members review current or emerging GEOINT standards, seek advice from their agency’s technical and acquisition experts, and then report in GWG meetings their position on the standard. Substantive objections have occurred, but these exchanges are welcome, as NGA recognizes that stovepipes will only be avoided by a community vetting process and reasonable waiver system that will not break interoperability.
The second function of the GWG is to carry out NGA’s role as functional manager for GEOINT standards by providing a formal community of interest to advocate and address key standardization issues for the NSG. This standards-focused forum exchanges information and discusses issues, identifies emerging standards and provides advice on the need to develop new standards, coordinates the development of new standards or specifications when appropriate, and serves as the subject matter expert within the DoD and the intelligence community for GEOINT standards matters.
A major success attributed to the GWG is the recent standards baseline coordinated by the GWG and released by NGA in its executive role as functional manager of GEOINT. The NCGIS worked with the GWG to develop a suite of internationally coordinated and approved standards, along with standards-based commercial off-the-shelf implementations that, when combined, move NGA and the geospatial community towards true data services interoperability and a service-oriented architecture (SOA).
“Through the GWG, NGA has collaboratively defined a common baseline of standards in response to an NSG-wide need. By adopting these core standards across the NSG, we are enabling interoperability and providing capabilities to the warfighter and decision maker,” NGA Director Vice Admiral Robert Murrett said in a recent NGA document. “By working together, the NSG is building a SOA that enables the storage, retrieval and sharing of vital GEOINT on which our nation’s leaders, military and other valued customers depend.”
In order to foster broad consensus on the foundations of GEOINT, the GWG recently expanded to welcome and encourage the participation of any interested combatant commands. This was largely the result of the JGA. (See MGT, Volume 4, Issue 4, page 22.)
JFCOM, STRATCOM and NGA devised an initiative within the JGA to ensure that GEOINT is provided in a bidirectional, standards-based environment that is net-centric and compatible with existing COCOM systems. JFCOM chose the GWG, the DISR and the DoD Metadata Registry as the means by which the JGA standards goals would be achieved. The result of the standards initiative was the enlistment of most of the remaining COCOMs into the GWG, where their intent is to develop and institute a process to validate and implement GEOINT standards implementation profiles, align NSG standards efforts with the DoD net-centric strategy, institute a process for JFCOM to address standards issues/gaps in the GWG and its focus groups, and contribute to the development of a geospatial SOA to promote interoperability.
It’s worth mentioning that another outcome of the JGA standards initiative is a community-coordinated standards compliance testing effort led by JFCOM and NGA, which will use the GWG vetting process. The GWG concurs that compliance testing is a significant step towards achieving interoperability.
INTEROPERABILITY CRITERIA
The testing and conformance program has two primary goals. The first is to ascertain the degree to which architectural design, principles, guidelines, concepts and standards, if deployed, will satisfy NSG functional capability objectives, user agency requirements and interoperability criteria.
Second, the program seeks to validate, establish confidence in, and sustain NSG architectural standards and guidance. Since the establishment of the program, NGA, on behalf of the GWG, has increased involvement with the Joint Systems Integration Command, support and coordination with Joint Data Strategy Division J87, and has leveraged Geospatial Intelligence Advancement Testbed opportunities.
“This is just an initial step in assessing interoperability issues as the community moves towards net-centricity and SOA. These relationships with USJFCOM and our armed forces will develop and strengthen, enabling the flow of GEOINT to and from the warfighter through the use and adoption of standards,” Mark DeMulder wrote in a May letter to the USJFCOM chief of NGA support, John Greene.
Membership in the GWG is not limited to the military and intelligence community. In order to include all aspects of the mathematical, scientific, acquisition and analysis disciplines, the GWG has given associate membership, with a technical advisory role, to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. Both organizations represent a diverse collection of developer and user communities worldwide, working in a consensus process to advance standards that promote interoperability within and across many different communities of use.
Critical to the GWG is OGC’s work to promote standards that are consistent with broader net-centric enterprise architectures. The bulk of the newly released standards baseline consists, in fact, of OGC specifications and standards. Other advisory agencies participating in the GWG include the International Organization of Standards, Digital Geospatial Information Working Group, NATO Air Group IV and coalition partners. The Federal Geographic Data Committee represents the civil community as a GWG core member, and invitations to the FBI, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency have been extended in response to a request from the Navy and various other core members.
FOCUS GROUPS
The GWG focus groups referred to above include the NITFS Technical Board, the technical focal point for imagery and imagery-related standardization activities within the GEOINT community; the Motion Imagery Standards Board, which monitors, defines and participates in the development of standards to ensure interoperability and maintain quality of motion imagery, associated metadata, audio, and other related systems; the Community Sensor Model Working Group, which serves as a collaborative environment for the development, verification, validation, maintenance, standardization and configuration management of sensor models; and an Application Schema and Feature Encoding group responsible for those aspects of the standardization of GEOINT relating to data format, feature and attribute coding schemes, exchange media, administrative procedures, representations of geographic feature geometry, feature attribution information, and other geographic information.
A portrayal group contends with standardization of GEOINT relating to the visual depiction of physical features and geographically referenced activities, including human-to-media interface aspects (visual symbolization of GEOINT and symbol design, for both digital display and hardcopy media), rules and behaviors of GEOINT symbols that may be necessary to ensure consistent rendering across the community, and the interoperability in the exchange of portrayal information among the GEOINT community.
The GWG’s Metadata Focus Group (MFG) deals with those aspects of the standardization of GEOINT relating to imagery, sensor and geospatial metadata. Metadata is used by a large population of users other than the producer of the metadata. Usually, it is created by one person and used by someone else. Standardizing the structure and use of metadata will provide creators with appropriate information to characterize the data. Furthermore, standardizing the use of metadata will enable users to effectively implement the metadata to facilitate the most efficient method to discover and retrieve the associated data. The GWG absorbed the MFG to ensure community consensus on major metadata issues.
The Information Transfer and Service Architecture Focus Group serves as a community-based technical advisory group to the GWG forum dealing with matters related to information transfer and architecture of GEOINT services. Information transfer is the movement of information from one system to another. Important are the “data services” that provide for posting, discovery, access, and analysis of GEOINT data stores and information stores in a distributed, real-time environment. Additional services are required for positioning, cataloguing, portrayal, change detection and so on. Careful attention is given to the underlying SOA in order to assure upward compatibility, plug-and-play services and components, and conformance with the market mainstream.
Most recently, the GWG stood up a Reporting Focus Group, which will deal with those aspects of the standardization of GEOINT relating to the format and structural contents of intelligence reports derived from the exploitation of imagery and geospatial information. This includes text-based reporting, bit-oriented reporting and graphical reporting.
The organizational structure of the Geospatial Intelligence Standards Working Group consists of a chair occupied by the director, NGA/NCGIS; a secretariat provided by the chair; core members, who have primary authority and responsibility toward gathering consensus; associate members, who serve as subject matter experts to the GWG (including NATO organizations and coalition partners); and guest participants from across the NSG and private industry that supply technology supporting GEOINT. Anyone interested in facilitating the adoption, promulgation and use of GEOINT standards for enabling technologies, data architecture and software tools is encouraged to participate. ♦
