Need-to-Share Architecture
Written by Samuel Unger and David Hsu
GIF 2011 Volume 9: Issue: 8 (November/December)
Advanced GEOINT tools are making significant contributions both to the warfighter and to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations worldwide. Powerful GEOINT content and the technology that allows it to be used any time, any place and from any device is growing exponentially.
This ongoing and rapid pace of growth requires the constant development of new approaches for ingesting, storing, discovering and delivering data to meet mission needs. Today’s most pressing challenge is complex: moving to a cloud architecture that allows for online, on-demand access while simultaneously managing user identity so that appropriate access can be assured in a need-to-share culture.
Before today’s cloud architecture, there was the stovepipe approach—a system developed to solve a specific problem. In most cases stovepipes do not easily integrate with other systems, so engineering changes require extensive configuration management or development when a new functionality is necessary.
This approach is inherently challenging when the objective is to provide enterprisewide architecture for storage, discovery and dissemination. Today the U.S. government is moving away from the stovepipe legacy systems to a net-centric, cloud-computing environment to alleviate this challenge.
Federal agencies, including the Department of Defense and the intelligence community, receive information from many different sources. Two of the fastest-growing areas are commercial airborne and satellite imagery. Both platforms provide customers with data from a variety of geospatially accurate, high-resolution sensors such as multi-spectral imagery, light detection and ranging, full motion video and synthetic aperture radar. This new online, on-demand environment enables the real-time integration, transparency and interoperability necessary to meet growing needs.
As we move from stovepipe systems to the standards-based cloud-computing architecture, it is becoming easier to share this kind of information, which in turn reduces operating costs. Both information and IT standards are being adapted to make it easier to quickly integrate new data sources into the workflow. The common library services architecture implemented today uses Web services to connect data holdings across multiple repositories, providing a virtual library that can be accessed from a single portal. In a needto- share information culture, the definition of the enterprise is evolving.
The new enterprise is becoming more flexible in order to adapt to this constantly changing operational environment. Looking through the lens of humanitarian assistance and disaster responses, experts now recognize that the goal is defined not only by mission, but also by the nature of the event, its location and often by multiple responders.
After the Haiti earthquake, for example, members of the redefined enterprise included DoD, the State Department, FEMA, American Red Cross, USAID and United Nations. Depending on the situation and the need of the affected population, membership and leadership in the enterprise will change. This evolution requires improved collaboration across many organizations for increased situational awareness.
When defining the enterprise and mission, inclusiveness should be a core principle. The challenge lies in balancing network security, business processes and mission requirements. Changes to IT policies and directives as well as corporate licensing restrictions are needed to increase data sharing and interoperability. As agencies increase their use of standards and transition away from stovepipe architectures, users can access content that lives in another agency’s library through Web-based services.
Standards enable increased sharing of information across multiple platforms and reduce the timelines required to integrate new sources. All data should have a minimal set of metadata to facilitate its discovery and dissemination throughout the enterprise, for example data type, date and time collected, and geographic location. Tying the geographic coordinates to a common baseline is also important to ensure the information aligns correctly when fused with other information sources.
Each member organization can establish a sliding scale of security to manage the flow of information. In a disaster situation, a data source can specify what imagery is needed and move it to an accessible repository. Moreover, an open source model allows the enterprise to accommodate social networks in order to gather and process information from the people affected.
Today, agencies are moving toward providing access to a wide variety of geospatially aware content in a multi-level security environment. Users will be able to search federated virtual libraries to find the information they need for each specific mission. Service level agreements will be used to meet customer needs and ensure a proactive approach to identifying challenges before they become critical. Information will be aligned to a common geospatial reference system to ensure accuracy for today’s high-precision mission needs. The end result will provide access to geospatially aware content anywhere, at any time, from any device. ♦
TASC engineers Samuel Unger and David Hsu work to develop new solutions for customers to make imagery, data and products accessible.
