Written by Harrison Donnelly
GIF 2012 Volume: 10 Issue: 1 (February)
One trend that seems to be especially resonating as 2012 gets under way concerns the importance not only of information sharing for national and homeland security intelligence, but also specifically the critical role of geospatial standards in undergirding and supporting that sharing.
One advocate of that view is Kshemendra Paul, program manager for the Information Sharing Environment, a federal office established by the 2004 intelligence reform law to provide analysts, operators and investigators with information related to integrated and synthesized terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and homeland security. Paul recently spoke to a U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation event on topics that included the use of geospatial standards as one of the foundations to enhance information sharing, as well as the identification of geospatial methods to increase interoperability among federal, state and local operators.
“The GEOINT community is clearly ahead of many others when it comes to information sharing,” Paul told the gotgeoint.com blog. “We want to drive standards development, so our government can better share and safeguard information in a repeatable, cost-effective way.”
Information sharing and standards are also likely to be major topics of discussion at the Esri Federal GIS Conference being held in Washington, D.C., in February. It’s not precisely the same topic as above, but one scheduled presentation that caught my eye was to highlight the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) development of a suite of tools providing on-demand access to critical infrastructure geospatial databases for emergency response planning and management.
Indeed, LLNL is clearly a significant force in this area, having designed a number of capabilities aimed at translating complex model data into scenario specific formats for decision-makers and the general public. One example is a tool called EleCent Earth, which is part of a broader component, Element Centric, that enables users to take full advantage of data related to counter-proliferation. Using Google Earth, EleCent Earth displays results in a geospatial format and enables users to search by area and topic of interest. ♦
|
Harrison Donnelly, Editor
Geospatial Intelligence Forum This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |
 |
