SAGE Knowledge
A U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) project that went into operation this fall is designed to bridge the gap between disparate situational awareness systems by integrating critical infrastructure, force tracking, interagency and incident management data at the unclassified, NIPRnet level.
As part of the command’s homeland defense mission, the Situational Awareness Geospatial Enterprise (SAGE) system makes geospatial and other data available to first responders and others through a Web-based open architecture.
The program, which was fielded for the 2007 hurricane season, recently received the 2007 U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s (USGIF) Intelligence Achievement Award in the military category.
SAGE is an ambitious program developed to create a user-defined operational picture (UDOP). Its goal is to geospatially enable the knowledge workers within the command by instituting an enterprise GIS capability that everyone can use. This allows the users to build a UDOP configured to meet their individual needs for data and display.
The program is a piece of the larger information sharing initiatives within the federal government, said Chris Mayfield, COP/GIS manager for NORTHCOM at Peterson AFB, Colo. “SAGE is directly tied in with what the Department of Homeland Security is doing with their tool set. By utilizing the same open and basic architectures to implement federal geospatial technologies, we’ll get closer to a true common operational picture.”
Indeed, the initiative is also trying to achieve the larger goal of changing the way people think about information, according to Dave McKinley, who along with Mayfield and fellow project participant Dave Gokey is a Navy Space and Naval Warfare Center (SPAWAR) employee supporting NORAD and NORTHCOM.
SAGE project partners include ESRI; the Naval Surface Warfare Center located in Dahlgren, Va.; and the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA).
“In the past, the entry point to understanding a situation was to first get a situation report, then ask to see on a map where the reported event occurred. We’re trying to make the map and geospatial data the entry point, and then access all the amplifying data through the map. So the first thing you see is a map, and then when you click on an icon, the situation report will pop up displaying the information. We’re trying to introduce the concept of the entry point being the map, rather than the text,” McKinley said.
“We are also trying to make SAGE the same level of usability as PowerPoint, Outlook and Word,” McKinley added. “When we think about doing our jobs on a daily basis, one of the daily environments we work in will be geographically based along the same level as e-mail and word processing.”
The key outcome, said Mayfield, will be to ensure that any NORTHCOM mission partner will be able to view its data in any viewer. “As long as you meet the Open Geospatial Consortium standards, you will be able to partner with NORTHCOM and share data seamlessly,” he said.
COMMON PICTURE
The origins of SAGE lay in an advanced concept technology demonstration sponsored by the Defense Information Systems Agency, known as the Homeland Defense Common Operational Picture (HLD COP).
“As NORTHCOM stood up, we found that a lot of the DHS and non-DoD partners that we were executing missions with did not normally have SIPRNet, nor the tools and capabilities to reach us on SIPRNet or even NIPRNet in order to share mission data. But we did find out that outside of DoD they were using a lot of GIS applications,” Mayfield recalled, noting that the goal of HLD COP was to take GIS data and ingest it into the Global Command and Control System- Joint (GCCS-J) system.
“While Dave Gokey was working on HLD COP, I was doing a lot of GIS work here as a COP manager at NORTHCOM,” he continued. “As we talked and worked together more often, we realized that it was really hard to take GIS data and put it into a program-of-record system. It did not look pretty at all, was hard to read, and there were a lot of usability issues with it. So we decided to try to take that program of record, GCCS-J, with air, land and maritime tracks, and put them into a GIS architecture, which is much easier to read and use. That’s how SAGE started.”
Getting the program of record onto NIPRNet originally was not easy, especially because Hurricane Katrina hit just as developers were planning the move onto NIPRnet, Within two days of landfall, Mayfield and Gokey had figured out what segments of GCCS-J were needed and where they could get track feeds from, and then put it on the NIPRNet.
“Then a couple of our Blue Force Tracking [BFT] folks at NORTHCOM found out who had GPS receivers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], and where we had a couple of BFT devices for our DoD forces,” said Mayfield. “We had all the FEMA search and rescue vehicles connected to our unclassified GCCS along with the Coast Guard feed and our own ground forces in support of Katrina. All that was really missing was the critical infrastructure piece to support the COP we had just built.”
After getting GCCS on the unclassified side, project managers slowly mapped out how they could build server-side GIS support to enable the rest of the NORTHCOM users who don’t normally use GIS day to day to have access to the tracks from GCCS and the Homeland Security Infrastructure Protection Database. The latter is a collection of critical infrastructure points that was put together by the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency.
The homeland security database represents the core data set inside of SAGE, which allows enterprisewide access at NORTHCOM to anyone who needs it, as well as the ability to view incidents behind it, as in fighting a fire or responding to a hurricane. It also includes the architecture to get the tools and applications to see what’s going on and get the big picture of “where” for any mission NORTHCOM may be involved in.
“By adding incidents to this digital map, we’ll get the ‘what’ as well, and then link that incident back to the mission event framework at NORTHCOM for anyone to view,” said Mayfield. “So any missions that go on, we have core Websites that deal with nothing but that mission set, and SAGE will be one piece in the operational execution and support of those missions.”
Putting the information on an unclassified network is critical, developers report, because many of the mission partners do not take cryptographic equipment with them into the field, and so are unable to get on SIPRNet or, if they can, must use a constricted communications pipeline.
“The goal of SAGE is to take core open technologies, give easier access to data and the ability to store that mission-essential data, and standardize that data across all agencies and mission partners,” said Mayfield.
DATA SEARCH
The big piece of this effort at NORTHCOM headquarters will be a three-dimensional viewer, Mayfield noted. “We’re going to be using ArcGIS Explorer from ESRI, which is similar to Google Earth but allows us to use our own data so that we don’t have to depend on an outside source for imagery or vector data sets. We’ve had our prime contractor, SYS Technologies, develop some custom apps for it, so that we can search our own data or take tasks that users have pushed to us via a requirements process, and build simple tools that allow them to search that data as well.
“So instead of users having to point and click through 130 data sets, they can easily search for what they need by clicking a point on the Earth as a reference of where they’d like to search, what data they’d like and within seconds have that data geospatially referenced in a 3-D space,” he said.
Another aspect of SAGE is an imagery catalog being built using EarthWare technology, which was recently acquired by SPADAC. “This allows us to catalog and search our raster holdings, which has always been a problem at J-3, where we have a million different imagery tiles to go through, but we just want imagery for one particular area. But when we get an imagery set from NGA, if we haven’t asked them to limit it for us, we get very large data sets that take a while to import and use,” Mayfield said.
The EarthWhere tool will allow users to catalog and search imagery holdings in a much more streamlined way, and provide the ability to provision just the area of imagery needed for any NORTHCOM mission in any format.
In addition to the organization of raster and vector data, project managers knew they would have to work out access for SAGE for external users. For the external piece, they partnered with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Mission Assurance Division.
“In particular, they run a 2-D Web program called TRITON that is based on the same ArcIMS architecture that we use but has a presence on the Web, which gives us the ability to share data seamlessly with them in a common architecture. So external mission partners who do not have NIPRNet access, but only the Internet, will be able to see nearly the same data sets and mission events that we have at headquarters NORTHCOM,” he added.
“Our primary customer is the J-3 at the NORAD NORTHCOM Command Center. They consolidate and organize any missions that we have going on, and are the first point of contact for non-DoD liaison officers. They are the ones who get the first phone calls on any incident we may be involved in, and supporting them is our first priority,” Mayfield said. ♦
