Editor's Perspective
The ESRI International User Conference, held each summer in San Diego, Calif., is billed as the world’s largest event dedicated to geographic information system (GIS) technology. Along with the in-depth content available at the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation’s GEOINT Symposium, scheduled this year for October 18–21 in San Antonio, Texas, the agenda of the ESRI conference provides a useful barometer of what’s on the minds of geospatial professionals in the military and intelligence fields, as well as a wide range of other GIS topics.
This year, two of the ESRI sessions—“Fusing Disparate Defense Data Sources” and “Disseminating Geospatial Intelligence to the Warfighter”—seem to me to hit the nail on the head as far as the critical issues in this field. While the topics covered in the numerous other defense-related sessions—from airfield operations to Army mapping—are also vitally important, I would suggest that the heart of the matter is about creating a unified picture and getting it to the person on the ground.
One of the speakers at the first-mentioned workshop, for example, was scheduled to describe an innovative partnership between the 7th Army’s engineer and intelligence communities to implement the Geospatial Network-centric Operations for the Warfighter (GeoNOW) concept, which seeks to provide accurate, relevant and consistent geospatial information throughout the organization. “Traditional geospatial support structures cannot keep pace with today’s warfighter information needs,” the session description notes.
The latter session, meanwhile, was to include a discussion of the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity’s (MCIA) Geographic Analysis Division. Marine programs in this area include the online Geographically Linked Information Dissemination Environment (GLIDE) and MCIA Geodatabase systems, which are currently supporting operations worldwide. An especially interesting effort is the Regional Expeditionary Intelligence Portable Resource (REIPR), which is providing preloaded, portable geographic intelligence in Southwest Asia and other areas where the Internet is not available.
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