The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community
GIS Engineer David LaBranche DISDI Program Manager OSD
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February 2014 Volume 12, Issue 1
Predictive Analytics O Unstructured Data ArcGIS O Activity Based Intelligence
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GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE FORUM Features
February 2014 Volume 12, Issue 1
Cover / Q&A
7
Geographic intelligence software
Long considered an essential tool for geographic information system professionals conducting a wide range of tasks, from urban design to military tactical planning, ArcGIS from Esri is taking on a growing role in the analysis and production of strategic intelligence. By Harrison Donnelly
16 10
20
Applying predictive analytics to military and national intelligence problems can be difficult, because intelligence analysts don’t have the luxury of neatly organized historical data that can be easily extrapolated out into the future, but instead must deal with a series of observations that may or may not be arranged according to time and place. By Peter Buxbaum
After the Activity Based Intelligence Working Group of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation developed a list of 16 “hard problems” facing ABI, GIF asked executives in key companies what they think is the “hardest” problem for the field, and how should it be addressed.
Predictive Analytics for Intel Advantage
Activity Based Intelligence
Departments
Structuring Data
Like a peacekeeping unit trying to constrain irregular forces that are all that much more difficult to control because they fail to fall within the conventional military categories of organization and command, the military and intelligence communities are struggling to get a handle on the unstructured data that is coming at them from a bewildering variety of sources. By William Murray
Industry Interview
2 Editor’s Perspective 4 PROGRAM NOTES/PEOPLE 6 Intel Update 14 Industry Raster 27 Resource Center
GXP XPLORER
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LOCATE, RETRIEVE, AND SHARE GEOSPATIAL DATA — WHEREVER IT IS Visit us at the 2014 Esri Federal GIS Conference booth 801 for a live demonstration. www.baesystems.com/gxp
24
John Yokley
President, Chief Executive Officer and Founder PTFS
28
David LaBranche Defense Installations Spatial Data Infrastructure Program Manager Office of the Secretary of Defense
“Our purpose is to be the business mission capability of people, policy and practices being used to acquire, steward and share installation, environment and range geospatial data.” —David LaBranche, DISDI Program Manager
EDITOR’S PERSPECTIVE
Geospatial Intelligence Forum Volume 12, Issue 1 • February 2014
The Magazine of the National Intelligence Community Editorial Managing Editor Harrison Donnelly harrisond@kmimediagroup.com Online Editorial Manager Laura McNulty lauram@kmimediagroup.com Copy Editor Sean Carmichael seanc@kmimediagroup.com Correspondents Peter A. Buxbaum • Cheryl Gerber William Murray • Karen E. Thuermer
Art & Design Art Director Jennifer Owers jennifero@kmimediagroup.com Senior Graphic Designer Jittima Saiwongnuan jittimas@kmimediagroup.com Senior Graphic Designers Scott Morris scottm@kmimediagroup.com Amanda Paquette amandak@kmimediagroup.com
Advertising Associate Publisher Scott Parker scottp@kmimediagroup.com
KMI Media Group Chief Executive Officer Jack Kerrigan jack@kmimediagroup.com Publisher and Chief Financial Officer Constance Kerrigan connik@kmimediagroup.com Editor-In-Chief Jeff McKaughan jeffm@kmimediagroup.com
Even in our hyper-connected world, it is still not easy to link up good ideas with the people who need them, in government and elsewhere. A recently formed non-profit group is trying to bridge that gap, however, by using both technology and personal contact to help government agencies find solutions for their needs. While directed toward the full range of government and national security programs, the Foundation for Innovation and Discovery (FINND) is beginning with a focus on the intelligence community. Its board of advisers includes a number of former senior IC leaders, and its initial events have or Harrison Donnelly are scheduled to feature talks by officials from NSA, CIA, DIA and NGA, as well Editor as small group discussions of such topics as analytical tradecraft and the role of cloud-enabled ops in IC innovation. Beyond holding events, however, what really caught my eye about FINND is that it is trying to create a mechanism for bringing together needs and solutions outside the strictures of government acquisition. Key to this process will be individuals from both inside and outside of government who serve as “FINNDERs’’ by recommending specific solutions for identified problems. The FINNDERs’ suggestions will help shape the content of “Discovery Summits,” which will be one-day events organized in connection with an agency to bring together and share some of the best ideas to fill their requirements. Another feature, still under development at this writing, is Discover Engine, an online portal that will serve as a virtual dashboard for discovery and innovation exchange. “What makes the FINND unique among other organizations is its network,” said Louis Tucker, the group’s president. “The FINND uses an innovative information value proposition to build its network to connect needs and capabilities. The incentive to get natural ‘finders’ to open their networks without financial gain is the nut the FINND cracked. Additionally, the FINND’s Mission Forums, which bring lower-level mission users together with technologists and industry, are fairly unique and have received rave reviews by our members.”
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The MetaVRC 1-inch per-pixel resolution imagery collection platform for real-time terrain visualization is now in operation. One-inch resolution imagery collected at 400 ft by remote-controlled aircraft Orthorecified imagery, elevation, and feature data imported and compiled in MetaVR Terrain Tools for Esri ArcGIS Real-time visualization of resulting 3D terrain in MetaVR Virtual Reality Scene Generator
Real-time screen capture from MetaVR’s visualization system is of the 3D virtual terrain of a geospecific area with 1-inch per pixel imagery collected by the MetaVRC™ aircraft. The operational readiness testing of the MetaVRC was performed as described by the FAA and AMA applicable airspace operation rules and regulations. (AMA National Safety Code and FAA AC 91-57.) Data was collected as part of this testing. This screen capture is unedited except as required for printing. The real-time rendering of the 3D virtual world is generated by MetaVR Virtual Reality Scene Generator™ (VRSG™). 3D model is from MetaVR’s 3D content libraries. Inset image is of MetaVR Terrain Tools for Esri ArcGIS. © 2014 MetaVR, Inc. All rights reserved. MetaVR, Virtual Reality Scene Generator, VRSG, MetaVRC, the phrase “Geospecific simulation with game quality graphics,” and the MetaVR logo are trademarks of MetaVR, Inc. Esri and ArcGIS are registered trademarks of Esri.
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PROGRAM NOTES
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
DARPA Seeks Insights for Intelligence Analysts The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has taken another step in its effort to greatly simplify the work of intelligence analysts who manually process massive volumes of complex data from multiple sources. The agency recently awarded a $79 million contract to BAE Systems as part of Phase 2 of its Insight program, which seeks to develop a system that will serve users by automatically fusing data from numerous sensors and using algorithms to discover and predict behaviors of possible threats. The system would analyze the multi-source data and convert it to useable intelligence in a process known as exploitation. For seamless tracking abilities, the system would also automatically manage sensor tasking. DARPA initiated the program to address the need for new tools and automation to enhance analyst capabilities and performance. Insight aims to create an adaptable, integrated system for ISR information to augment intelligence analysts’ support of time-sensitive operations on the battlefield. In addition, Insight’s automated backend processing capabilities will include behavioral learning and prediction algorithms to help analysts discover and identify potential threats and explore hypotheses about those threats’ potential activities. “BAE Systems has invested in developing a portfolio of sensor data processing and exploitation systems to provide analysts with usable intelligence and intuitive, easy-to-use sensor controls,” said David Logan, vice president and general manager of technology solutions at BAE Systems. “We are able to capitalize on the core technologies we’ve developed for other intelligence programs, including multi-sensor fusion, reasoning algorithms, and automatic resource tasking, while advancing our expertise in this area.” BAE Systems will lead the Phase 2 team, which includes Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories, SAIC, Charles River Analytics, Intific, Aptima, HF Designworks and PatchPlus Consulting.
For example, Charles River Analytics, a developer of human-machine interfaces for a wide range of decision-support systems, will support the design and development of the Insight user experience. The team plans to collaborate to mature the Insight system by integrating information from additional sources, such as space, air, sea, and ground sensors; human intelligence; and information repositories and networks. Insight also plans to support other mission domains, such as mobile missile hunts, counterinsurgency, wide-area security and integrated air defense systems. During the first phase of the Insight program, BAE Systems developed an automatic/semi-automatic system for exploitation and resource management, as well as sensor models for testing the Insight system under a wider variety of operational conditions. Phase 1 focused on supporting tactical brigades and battalions in irregular warfare scenarios.
PEOPLE Army Brigadier General (Promotable) Scott D. Berrier, who has been serving as director of Intelligence, J-2, U.S. Central Command, has been assigned as deputy chief of staff, intelligence, International Security Assistance Force, Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan. Marcel Lettre has been appointed to the Senior Executive Service as principal deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Lettre previously served as
4 | GIF 12.1
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
special assistant to the secretary of defense.
Brig. Gen. Mark R. Quantock
Army Brigadier General Mark R. Quantock has become military deputy of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. As NGA’s senior
ranking military officer, he is a member of the NGA Command Element, where he advises the director on the combat support agency functions and provides a uniformed military perspective to the NGA board of directors. He manages NGA combat support and other functions in 35 locations embedded with military mission partners, and oversees NGA’s expeditionary operations. Spatial Networks, a geospatial technology
and services company focused on developing innovative apps for industry and government, has announced the appointment of Julia Bowers as chief operating officer. Intergraph Government Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intergraph Corp. serving the U.S. federal market, has added Gerald King as incoming senior vice president of life cycle solutions, heading a division of the company
that serves a number of organizations in the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Department of Homeland Security. Stephen Kupcha has joined SAP National Security Services as business development senior specialist. Kupcha is also serving as the first executive director for the company’s non-profit organization, NS2 Serves, an IT training and career placement program for post-9/11 veterans.
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INTEL UPDATE Congress has passed a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that will provide stability to the acquisition process by funding the government through FY14 and prevent the United George Meyers States from hitgmeyers@gmeyers.com ting the debt ceiling in early February. Under this legislation the Department of Defense will lose $32.8 billion from FY13 to FY14, but will avoid the $22 billion sequestration cut. The good news is that because the 1,582page legislation includes all 12 funding bills, Congress won’t have to pass any additional continuing resolutions for the fiscal year. Also, the next deadline is eight months away, September 30. Regarding cyber-policy, the omnibus spending bill calls for the National Security Agency director to send three reports to Congress on the agency’s collection of Americans’ phone records. The reports will detail the number of calls reviewed and the number of records of Americans they accumulated through the program, the agency’s process for collecting the data, and outline terrorist activity terminated because of NSA’s data program. It is highly unlikely President Obama will initiate sweeping reform of the NSA; recently the president and security officials have deemed the agency a key tool in preventing terrorist attacks. Legislators are also becoming increasingly concerned with protecting customer data. The House recently voted in favor of the “health exchange security and transparency act,” which requires the Department of Health and Human Services to notify a customer within two business days if their personal information on the health insurance marketplace was hacked. The environment in Washington today is one where lawmakers pat themselves on the back for almost passing a budget deal on time and defense decision-makers must be content with cutting fewer programs than they originally anticipated. Yet, cyber is still a “sweet spot” within the federal government. Government spending on cyber is lightly regulated, and its importance in the mind of budget makers is only going to grow. O 6 | GIF 12.1
By George Meyers
Current intelligence legislation in Congress:
Bill #
Sponsor
Committee Assignment
Description
H.R. 3103
Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.)
House Judiciary, House Intelligence
Amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to modify the reporting requirements for decisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
H.R. 3361
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.)
House Judiciary, House Intelligence, House Financial Services
Reform the authorities of the federal government to require the production of certain business records, conduct electronic surveillance, use pen registers and trap and trace devices, and use other forms of information gathering for foreign intelligence, counterterrorism, and criminal purposes.
H.R. 3035
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.)
House Judiciary, House Intelligence
Permit periodic public reporting by electronic communications providers and remote computer service providers of certain estimates pertaining to requests or demands by federal agencies under the provisions of certain surveillance laws where disclosure of such estimates is, or may be, otherwise prohibited by law.
H.R. 3070
Rep Michael Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.)
House Judiciary, House Intelligence
Amend section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to reform access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations.
H.R. 2952
Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-Pa.)
House Homeland Security
Make certain improvements in the laws relating to the advancement of security technologies for critical infrastructure protection.
H.R. 2962
Rep. Donald Payne (D-N.J.)
House Homeland Security
Provide for independent research of the future resilience and reliability of the nation’s electric power transmission and distribution system.
H.R. 3032
Rep. James Langevin (D-R.I.)
House Oversight and Government Reform
Create a National Office for Cyberspace and revise requirements relating to federal information security.
H.R. 3107
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.)
House Homeland Security
Require the secretary of homeland security to establish cybersecurity occupation classifications, assess the cybersecurity workforce and develop a strategy to address identified gaps in the cybersecurity workforce.
H.R. 3677 H.R. 3683
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.)
House Science, Space, and Technology
Amend the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 to improve U.S.-Israel energy cooperation.
H.R. 3696
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas)
House Homeland Security; House Science, Space, and Technology
Amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to make certain improvements regarding cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection.
H.R. 3847
Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.)
House Energy and Commerce; House Oversight and Government Reform
Require the secretary of homeland security the responsibility to develop and provide to the secretary of health and human services risk-based, performance-based cybersecurity standards for the federal information technology requirements under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, including the healthcare.gov website.
S. 1353
Sen. John Rockefeller (D-W.Va.)
Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation
Provide for an ongoing, voluntary public-private partnership to improve cybersecurity, and strengthen cybersecurity research and development, workforce development and education, and public awareness and preparedness.
S. 1638
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.)
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Promote public awareness of cybersecurity.
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Popular GIS software takes on growing role in intelligence analysis. Long considered an essential tool for geographic information system professionals conducting a wide range of tasks, from urban design to military tactical planning, ArcGIS from Esri is taking on a growing role in the analysis and production of strategic intelligence. ArcGIS is an industry-standard software platform that enables users to create and use maps, compile and analyze geographic data, and manage and distribute information. It both offers many different functionalities and serves as the basis for development of a plethora of specific applications. Esri’s strategy for ArcGIS, which is available for desktop, enterprise, mobile and online formats, calls for providing the core ArcGIS system as a broad platform suitable for many different industries, and then developing on top of that a series of solution templates geared to specific fields. The templates, provided to customers at no additional cost, offer standard maps, applications and workflows suited to the unique needs of each industry. For example, the company for some time has offered ArcGIS for the Military, which provides analysts, planners and operational units with maps and applications to support deployed military forces in land, maritime and domestic operations. What is new is that Esri in the past year or so has made available ArcGIS for Intelligence, which includes capabilities geared specifically to help the national intelligence community manage source information, perform analysis and fusion of information, maintain situational awareness, and share information with decision makers. The solution also contains components for military intelligence analysis of land or maritime operations. “The work and techniques of national intelligence analysts may be similar, but instead of supporting military operations, they are focused on intelligence production supporting policy and decision making,” explained Ben Conklin, Esri lead for www.GIF-kmi.com
By Harrison Donnelly, GIF Editor
terrain from ArcGIS,” said Garth Smith, chief defense solutions. “They do war fighting supexecutive officer and co-founder of MetaVR. port, but they have different needs and a broader community to serve than the military intelligence analysts. We created ArcGIS Esri for Intelligence to have some tools and workflows to support the needs of the national In ArcGIS for Intelligence, Esri focuses intelligence community.” on key workflows that reflect common ArcGIS’s ability to serve patterns in how people use as the foundation for developGIS. “There are three areas, ment of other functionality, based on typical ways we however, spreads its influsee GIS being used. One ence and importance for the area is the management of intelligence and related fields source information. We also well beyond just those taisee people using ArcGIS to lored packages of solutions. bring together data to anaRecognizing the critical role lyze patterns, relationships of the software for all types and probabilities of things of GIS users, most key playhappening in the future. Garth Smith ers in the geospatial field Finally, we look at informahave entered close partnertion sharing, putting anaships with Esri and developed their technollytic products together into a finished ogies specifically to work on top of ArcGIS. product for sharing. We’re also going to Companies offering ArcGIS-based software bring in some additional workflows for for intelligence and related missions include monitoring real-time events,” Conklin MetaVR, Exelis VIS, TerraGo and ClearTerra. said. Developers of such products freely Each of the categories offers a variety acknowledge the critical role of ArcGIS in of different tools, for example to perform both their technology and their business routing analysis, analyze incident data or strategy. For example, MetaVR, which offers work with full motion video. a 3-D render engine for creating realistic simulations for training and other purposes, depends on direct data feeds from ArcGIS. “Without their products, it would be very hard to have our company, because the terrain creation process is very complicated. Everything is dependent on getfeatures in MetaVR’s Terrain Tools For ArcGIS enable users to turn their geospatial data into ting content into the Terrain real-time 3-D terrain from within ArcGIS software. In addition to building 3-D terrain with imagery render engine, and and elevation data, feature data can also be used as input. This screen capture shows data sources of Kismayo, Somalia, including the roadway linear features. [Image courtesy of MetaVR] that content is 3-D GIF 12.1 | 7
Esri as a company is emphasizing online access, and among other things offers the ArcGIS for Server extension, which provides a map-centric collaborative content management system that organizations can deploy in their own infrastructure. That is particularly appealing to intelligence agencies, which can take all the technology on the public website and bring it behind their firewall. “We have the framework technology that solutions can plug into,” Conklin noted. “Instead of having to build a large system, you can have the focused apps to deploy, and use the backend information management system to do the heavy lifting. The apps are easy to use, because behind the scenes there is a key framework helping to manage data and collaborate. You don’t need to download all the data to your local computer to produce results, but can do this in a more interactive way. It lets us deliver focused pieces of functionality, where in the past we had to build a large application or system to accomplish the same thing.” The intelligence package contains tools for using video, and the company is planning to expand its full motion video (FMV) capabilities, Conklin explained. “We look at video as another source of information. It can be a source of imagery, but also can bring other intelligence information, such as moving tracks. It’s an additional source of data to increase our knowledge about an area. There is also a lot of value in bringing GIS data into video, such as from an intelligence database, to give context and help understand what is in the video. “In the next few months, we’ll be working to do more to integrate FMV as part of standard intelligence products,” he continued. “There is also a lot of room in our workflows for how to use FMV as part of the standard intelligence cycle. There is also room for managing FMV from a geospatial perspective, looking in space and time to understand the video. Finally, there will be a lot more motion imagery sensors emerging, so we’ll support those, which are great technology but also bring us a whole new range of issues to deal with.” Like any company, Esri strives to get input from customers about problems or ways to improve its products. But that can be a challenge in working with the intelligence community, Conklin acknowledged. “We’re always looking for feedback. But the reality in this community is that it can be challenging. A lot of the workflows are very sensitive. We spend a lot of time inside facilities working 8 | GIF 12.1
with our users. What we try to do is ensure that what we’re building can be applied to their workflows. But we have to take their feedback in a general sense, because we’re not building classified products. “We’re sensitive about not causing any problems by capturing workflows or tradecraft that are sensitive. We get feedback, but one of the things that is challenging about this solution is that we have to be very careful that we handle feedback appropriately. It’s a unique challenge with the intelligence solution, more than anything else we work on,” he added.
with the 1 meter resolution frequently used in simulations. “When you progress from 1 meter to 3 cm, the terrain just comes alive. The stuff that you might have to model with a classic terrain tool, such as putting a road texture on the roads to make them stand out, is now there. The terrain looks so dramatically different when you have that high resolution imagery,” Smith said.
Exelis VIS
Exelis VIS also coordinates many of its products closely with ArcGIS, with offerings that include ENVI for ArcGIS Server, which MetaVR allows users to author, publish and distribute image analysis tools and models to the entire MetaVR’s primary product is Virtual organization. With ENVI image analysis tools Reality Scene Generator (VRSG), a real time available within the ArcGIS Server environ3-D visualization application that undergirds ment, end users can take full advantage of the company’s goal of creating “geospecific the rich geographic data consimulation with game quality tained in imagery. graphics.” The two companies’ prodComplementing VRSG is ucts complement each other, Terrain Tools, an extension for observed Mark Bowersox, ArcGIS for Desktop that leversolutions engineer for Exelis ages its infrastructure of GIS VIS. “One of the primary reatechnology to turn geospatial sons to work with ArcGIS is to data into real-time 3-D envihelp the analyst gain efficienronments for training simulacies,” he said. “Esri has niche tions and other purposes. capabilities in spatial analysis But the render engine George Demmy and geographic data dissemtechnology is only as good ination, and we have niche as the data content that goes capabilities in image processing and advanced into it, Smith noted. “That means we have analytics. Being able to put those capabilities to create the 3-D environments that go into together is the main advantage. simulations. A while ago, we were building “The entire ENVI product suite integrates our 3-D environments, and realized that with ArcGIS, and most recently, we have been it would be an overwhelming task to supworking on the server-based interoperabilport all the different formats for imagery ity. But we also offer integration features at or elevation data, which are extremely well the desktop, workflow and enterprise levels. done by ArcGIS products. What we did was They each build on each other. At the deskbuild our TerrainTools on top of all of that top, it’s more about working with imagery to infrastructure. get it ready and extract information, and then “People only buy our render software if using those products in a GIS to do spatial there is good content for it,” he added. “The analysis or modeling. At the workflow level, it tremendous infrastructure that is built into gives you the ability to streamline a pre-existthe Esri product line allows us to build tering process and replicate it for analysts. At the rain more quickly than with a competing server level, it could be connecting to imagery product that had to develop all the underservices that ArcGIS provides, and doing deep lying technology for terrain creation on its analytics or advanced image processing from own. It would be hard to compete with the those services,” Bowersox said. amount of development that Esri has done One of the benefits is to be able to streamand continues to do.” line a process into a consistent workflow, he Smith also highlighted a new MetaVR noted. “It can capture tradecraft that may product that combines low-cost aircraft data be handed down from senior engineers or collection and processing workflows to create image scientists into a streamlined work3-D terrain imagery with the exceptionally flow, so that a junior analyst or someone with high resolution of 3 cm per pixel, compared www.GIF-kmi.com
less expertise in the field can use the workflow to achieve results. The benefit is getting best-of-breed processing from both the GIS and imagery sides, encapsulating that into a workflow, and reducing the amount of training involved in bringing someone up to speed.”
TerraGo TerraGo Technologies, which develops technology for location intelligence, geospatial collaboration and field data collection, offers TerraGo Publisher for ArcGIS, a tightly integrated extension to ArcGIS for helping intelligence analysts distill their work into products that are easily consumed and used. Publisher creates GeoPDF maps that can be analyzed and marked up with the TerraGo Toolbar hosted in Adobe Reader or Acrobat. These markups can be brought into ArcGIS with their georeferencing intact, which can be valuable to analysts in establishing a meaningful, quantitative relationship and conversation with people who rely upon their analysis. Integrating with ArcGIS offers a number of benefits, observed George Demmy, chief technology officer for TerraGo. “It has a host of rich capabilities and is a natural environment for doing a variety of intelligence analysis tasks. The very tight and seamless integration with ArcGIS reduces the distance between the analyst and the consumer of the results of that analysis,” he said. Looking ahead for his company, Demmy sees products that will be of interest to analysts who want to create richer, more interactive geospatial intelligence products. “We are going to be focusing on making the data used to create the analytic product more useful and accessible, and making exchanging information with the people they serve both simpler and richer. We are continuously enhancing our integration with ArcGIS from different perspectives, but primarily with an eye on making the results of the intelligence analysis much more useful to its ultimate consumer,” Demmy said.
ClearTerra ClearTerra offers LocateXT product technology, which searches unstructured textual data, rapidly finding and transforming geocoordinates, temporal, and other customizable information into standard map data. For ArcGIS technology, LocateXT is available within three core platforms: as an www.GIF-kmi.com
environment with ISR platforms, payloads extension to ArcGIS Desktop, including the and environment analysis and visualization; ArcToolbox; within ArcGIS Server, where automate the creation of ISR data and analLocateXT can be published as geoprocessing ysis into the ArcGIS environment; and inteservices/widgets; and LocateXT for ArcGIS grate ISR capability into any ArcGIS product. Online, which offers direct integration with “STK produces a variety Esri’s cloud-based GIS platof analytical capability for form for rapid dissemination the IC, such as satellite overand sharing. flight; ground, air and space LocateXT supports many RF analysis; aircraft mission ArcGIS platforms and use planning; and sensor modelcases, explained Jeff Wilson, ing,” Smith said. “Since many ClearTerra vice president of intelligence analysts use sales. “On the ArcGIS deskArcGIS as part of their daytop, an analyst may creto-day function, all of these ate a geodatabase of results analytical products can seamusing LocateXT, or embed Jeff Wilson lessly be integrated into their LocateXT in an automated workflow. STK Desktop leverworkflow model to accomages ArcObjects to natively plish several analytical/georead and write any ArcGIS processing tasks with the formatted data. STK Server data. LocateXT within ArcGIS has an optional ArcGIS Server Server provides widely availinterface to enable ArcGIS able geoprocessing services, geo-processing services to where users can use LocateXT invoke STK capability from within Web-mapping widgets the web. This off-the-shelf with thinner GIS clients or interoperability provides a web-browsers,” he said. tremendous solution for the Using the ArcGIS Online/ Mark Bowersox mission.” Portal for ArcGIS platform, Intelligence analysts use LocateXT extracts critical STK to model trajectories, determine sensor spatial data from unstructured documents performance and analyze the RF environand publishes the spatial output directly to ment. But as Smith pointed out, this analthe online content portal. The source docuysis product is often difficult to get into the ments are concurrently uploaded to the conhands of senior decision makers or specialtent portal, and are accessible from the Web ized intelligence analysts. “ArcGIS provides map. Everything relevant to the situation an enterprise-scalable conduit to create and is in the portal and can be shared instantly disseminate the STK analysis product. Thirdwith different groups of users with different party consumers of STK analytical content access controls. can get the information when they want it, “LocateXT specifically shines when and how they need it,” he said. tightly integrated with ArcGIS platforms. It “ArcGIS provides a widely deployed, offrapidly discovers and extracts from unstructhe-shelf, common geospatial language to tured data to a structured geospatial output. communicate over,” Smith continued. “This What can then be accomplished with that enables specialized capability to interoperate structured data output is quite comprehenwith more generic systems so that disparate sive, including symbologies, query/search, workflows and functions can effectively work geoprocessing, data dissemination and much together to support the mission. STK promore,” Wilson said. vides off-the-shelf analytic capability for land, sea, air and space systems. Disseminating AGI STK’s capability throughout the broader geospatial enterprise gives the mission much Systems Tool Kit (STK) modeling, analmore value.” O ysis and visualization software tools from AGI enable ArcGIS users to enhance the design and development of defense, intelligence and civilian decision-support applicaFor more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup. tions, according to Todd Smith, AGI product com or search our online archives for related stories manager. AGI software integrated with the at www.gif-kmi.com. Esri ecosystem can enhance the ArcGIS GIF 12.1 | 9
Big-data-based forecasting methods offer promise of real-time information for decision making. By Peter Buxbaum, GIF Correspondent In the commercial world, retailers apply predictive analytics to customer behavior in order to maximize sales and profits, crunching data to find the right time to make the right offer to the right customer. Retailers have such a rich trove of historical customer data that, with the use of the latest technology, consumer behavior can be predicted with considerable accuracy. Applying predictive analytics to military and national intelligence problems, however, is a different matter. Intelligence analysts don’t have the luxury of neatly organized historical data that can be easily extrapolated out into the future, but instead must deal with a series of observations that may or may not be arranged according to time and place. More importantly, they often are trying to anticipate unknown actions of an unknown adversary. In contrast to the merchant, who often has relatively complete data on a customer and has the specific goal of making a sale, intelligence analysts are often working with incomplete data and without knowing what the next move is supposed to be. In fact, the application of predictive analytics to intelligence often focuses on what is missing in the data or how certain observations diverge from the expected norm. Some experts insist on calling this process not predictive analytics but anticipatory analytics, in order to distinguish it from similar processes in other realms. Predictive analytics is an outgrowth of the branch of information technology known as business intelligence (BI). Traditional BI looks backward to provide visibility into historical data that can explain how and why an organization is doing well or poorly. But in the fast-moving and ever-shifting landscape of today, relying on historical data alone is like driving a car while only looking into the rearview mirror. Predictive analytics promises to uncover challenges and opportunities that are coming down the pike, providing the opportunity to proactively deal with them. 10 | GIF 12.1
In the geospatial field, predictive analytics involves analyzing events to uncover relevant patterns and relationships related to a place. By illuminating the spatial and temporal factors that relate a certain type of event, it is possible to statistically anticipate where similar events are most likely to occur in the future. This allows analysts, warfighters and law enforcement officials to focus tightly on those areas. Geospatial predictive analytics relies on a host of data sources, including imaging and full-motion video sensors, location-enabled applications, and open source information such as social media data. Technology advancements that enable the processing of ever-larger data sets also serve predictive analytics. While predictive analytics can narrow down areas of interest dramatically, it also can consider greater geographical areas than in the past, thus enabling consideration by analysts of a broader set of hypotheses before narrowing them down. New visualization technologies have also been applied to geospatial predictive analytics. Once a set of locations with similar spatial characteristics is correlated with past events, hundreds of geospatial data layers can be reviewed to identify the physical, cultural and social factors that may correlate with the activity being examined. These hot spots, once identified, can be visualized on a map highlighting where similar events are most likely to occur, allowing users of the intelligence to deploy their resources more effectively.
Proactive Collection As intelligence analysts and consumers alike are deluged with increasing volumes of data at an accelerating pace, they need to derive actionable intelligence from the data faster, before the information gets stale. “The government is looking to be more proactive with respect to the data it is collecting,� said Matt Fahle, a senior www.GIF-kmi.com
executive for intelligence services at Accenture. “The longer it takes to act on intelligence, the more impact is lost over time. The pace at which data is being gathered, and the ability to analyze that data so folks can act quickly, is really driving a world of insights.” “Traditional forecasting models are based on using historical data to identify future occurrences related to specific data sets and predetermined models,” said Justin Christian, director of technology and innovation at Mercury Intelligence Systems. “Today’s predictive analytics include forecasting, but are much broader in nature. They enable the discovery of previously unknown information, often without well-defined models driving those predictions, and they are usually associated with large volumes of data, much of it unstructured. In addition to forecasting based on observed trends, predictive analytics can also provide knowledge of previously unknown trends or patterns.” “What is happening with predictive analytics represents a huge paradigm shift,” said Scott Broudy, strategic account manager for defense and the intelligence community at MicroStrategy. “Besides the refocus from backward-looking to forward-looking analysis, we are seeing developments in technology that allow more people who are not data scientists or mathematicians to use predictive analytical tools.” The goal of any military or intelligence function is to be preMatt Fahle dictive in nature rather than reactive, noted Matt Hughes, president of Mercury Intelligence Systems. “Most current legacy tools are useful in evaluating events that occurred in the past, but that information is rarely useful at the tactical level for current operations,” he said. “Predictive analytics are the key to understanding events in real time so that commanders and decision makers can Justin Christian be proactive in dealing with events that affect them directly.” Predictive analytics can provide military and intelligence organizations with a number of important capabilities, according to Barry Barlow, chief technology officer at The SI Organization. “One is that it can highlight correlations that people can’t do manually,” he said. “Second, it shortens the time to decision making. Even Barry Barlow with huge data sets and complex models, a reasonable set of recommendations can be generated within minutes. Third, it allows the power of social knowledge to be applied by people of diverse www.GIF-kmi.com
sets of experiences by leveraging the wisdom of the crowd. Fourth, performance improves over time thanks to algorithms that can learn from the feedback loop.” Law enforcement personnel may be looking for the next spot where an unknown malefactor may commit his next crime, while military intelligence analysts may be looking to see where a group may place its next IED. “Insurgents, like criminals, do things multiple times, and not just once,” said Sean Bair, president of Bair Analytics. “They keep on doing it until they get caught. With predictive analytics, it is possible to develop insurgents’ modus operandi and where they might emplace the next IED. We can also figure out who their suppliers are and when they move the supplies, so that troops can be allocated to take out the emplacers as well as the suppliers.” “We worked with the Department of Defense on IED defeat,” said Jim Stokes, vice president of Insight Commercial Solutions at DigitalGlobe. “Once we developed a signature, we would predict other areas they were likely to hit.”
Anticipatory Intelligence But intelligence analysts are often not dealing with clean data. The data may be sparse and incomplete or it may be bad data interspersed with good data. “In the national intelligence domain, we often talk about anticipatory analytics,” said Jordan Becker, vice president and genJordan Becker eral manger for geospatial intelligence and ISR at BAE Systems. “In the case of predictive analytics, we want to know the outcome of a known event such as an election or the reaction of the stock market to a company announcement. In the intelligence world, we don’t necessarily know the future activity or the date of observations that allow us to create hypotheses of what the future event might be. Scott Broudy You need to open the aperture to include all observations to form a hypothesis of what the events are and what the observations are pointing to.” Linking individuals and activities geospatially is an important part of the predictive process, according to Barlow. “Linking diverse intelligence reports describing the movement of objects geospatially is important Matt Hughes in making good predictions about future activities and their locations,” he said. “In the case of a chemical or biological threat to a city, for example, we can model traffic patterns and the GIF 12.1 | 11
movements of individuals. The difficult part is that this is often based on imagery rather than on structured data.” In the case of military missions, geospatial predictive analytics can answers questions on threats and counterthreats or the correct approach to raiding a building. “If a facility that looks like a residence appears to be burning its own garbage, that is abnormal,” said Becker. “This can be detected geospatially. The question then becomes how to use that data to form a hypothesis about what is going on in that residence.” SAS Social Media Analytics heat map showing tweets about Syria and the topics (taxonomy) listed in the bottom left of the DigitalGlobe has undertaken a human geog- picture. The heat map shows where in the world people are talking about Syria as it relates to those topics. raphy project, which it intends eventually to suggested. “That is why social media is being incorporated into cover the entire globe. The point is to amass and correlate sufthe tradecraft,” he said. “It is a very good predictive indicator ficient geospatial and other types of data to be able to predict of certain trends, where they originate, and how they spread. human trends on a regional basis. One predictive analysis showed the relationship between “For example, our algorithms will look at certain activities social unrest and water shortages in Africa and informed poland ascertain their distances to roads, rivers, vegetated areas icies on well-development activities and water desalination and other geospatially related terrain features that might charinvestments.” acterize the environment,” said Ken Campbell, Vice President The SAS National Security Group analyzes social media of National Security Solutions for DigitalGlobe. information to help DoD and intelligence agencies plan “This is also loaded up with humanitarian projects. demographic data such as lan“We use open source social media and SAS analytics to sift guages and tribal affiliations. At through millions of documents to discover where new refugee the end of the day we have an camps or hospitals may be located,” said Mark Kriz, a senior understanding of the top geospaaccount executive. “We have used behavioral analytics on the tial factors that influence behavsame type of data to determine the attitudes of populations ior. That becomes a starting point towards their local politicians. We are able to develop an underfor a better understanding about standing of the sentiment of native peoples toward a variety of what may be driving activity in topics. Based on that, we are able to predict how events may given region,” Campbell said, unfold in a certain region and how those events may trend.” adding that this model has been applied in the Horn of Africa to Ken Campbell discover factors that drove local Aggregative Estimation populations to refugee camps. When the U.S. military and The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity the intelligence community inter(IARPA), a research organization under the Office of the act with local populations abroad, Director of National Intelligence, runs several programs that one key toward understanding the are investigating new methodologies for predictive analytics. landscape and predicting future One of those programs, Aggregative Contingent Estimation developments is to ascertain the (ACE), seeks to develop methods for modeling human judgsentiments of those local commuments on geopolitical events. nities. Predictive analytical tools “As part of that, we run one of the largest experiments in are increasingly using data from forecasting,” said Jason Matheny, the ACE program manager. Marc Kriz social media in order to make that “More than 10,000 people have participated in generating over estimation. 1 million forecasts on hundreds of political questions over the “There is a lot of excitement last two and a half years.” about what can be done with ACE seeks to improve forecasting by scoring the accuracy of this type of information,” said the judgments they collect. “We look at the types of questions Campbell. “Combining that with people get right and the types they get wrong,” said Matheny. geospatial data can generate a pic“We study how we can improve the accuracy of forecasts by ture of what people are thinking better understanding patterns of judgment and by using statisin various parts of the world.” tical methods to correct predictable errors of judgment.” An analysis of Twitter feeds Another IARPA program that Matheny runs, Open Source overlaid on a geospatial backIndicators (OSI), combines human judgments with open ground could have predicted source data such as social media, news reports and Wikipedia Daniel Boyle the Arab Spring of 2012, Barlow to try and gain insights on emerging trends such as political 12 | GIF 12.1
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instability and disease outbreaks. The program recently has focused on events in Latin America. “The geospatial component to OSI is that we link open source data to specific cities to forecast political instabilities and disease outbreaks at the city level,” said Matheny. “An important aspect of this process is the geolocation of sources of social media data. Within the last year we have achieved a several-fold improvement in the state of the art by being able to locate the source of social media data within 8 kilometers of its actual location.” One of the conclusions of IARPA’s research This SAS Social Media Analytics time series of social media data is visualized to understand regional instability in Yemen. is that predictions are most accurate when mul- [Image courtesy of SAS] tiple methodologies, models, experts and modes of data are employed. “There has been an emphasis in OSI “Human judgment is still huge,” said Bair. “At the end of in using multimodal data combinations such as text, metaday, analysts have to evaluate whether the results of the analytdata and video to generate forecasts for geopolitical and pubical process really hold water. They are also evaluating how the lic health events,” said Matheny. “This has achieved unusually model is doing at every step. Math doesn’t know what humans good results.” know. An algorithm may look at the data and forecast that an An important challenge facing predictive analytics practiattack may occur in the middle of a lake. If something like that tioners is how to develop a hypothesis even in the absence of happens, an analyst can adjust the data so that the algorithm complete data. In other words, users must ask an intelligent can look at it in a different way.” question in order to get a decent answer out of the predictive “Human judgment is important in forming hypotheses,” process. said Becker. “Predictive analytical tools use statistical meth“DoD and the intelligence community like dirty data,” ods developed a long time ago. Human cognition is necessary said Daniel Boyle, a sales director at SAS. “They are looking to make the associations required in forming hypotheses.” for anomalies or outliers in that data. Commercial customers IARPA’s ACE program treats human judgment as another would want us to scrub that data before applying predictive and form of unstructured data to which statistical models can be text analytics to that.” applied. “We can think of human judgment as a kind of sen“Sometimes the missing data points give you the best sor and the correction of human judgment as a sensor fusion information,” said Becker. “A change in an observed pattern of problem,” said Matheny. “Humans exhibit inherent biases, but behavior may be a clue that something is about to happen. For these can be adjusted much like the positions of sensors are example, the observation of trucks moving in the desert may adjusted. By statistically combining judgments, we can correpresent weapons shipments. When those movements stop is rect for bias. That is something the ACE program is specifiwhen a group may be preparing to launch an attack.” cally focused on.” When analysts are deluged with data, inferencing becomes The biggest difference predictive analytics makes from an important analytical method because it is difficult to the human perspective is to transform the job of the analyst. deduce—that is, to identify by reasoning—the most likely “Typically, analysts spend 80 percent of their time trying to hypotheses from a large list of possibilities. “Too much data find relevant data, and 20 percent of their time analyzing the becomes noise,” said Becker. “Separating the noise from the data,” said Kriz. “Even then, they are able to find only a small signal becomes a big part of the problem. Inferencing allows subset of relevant data. Our methodologies allow analysts to us to narrow down the range of possible hypotheses based on acquire much more data than they could manually.” all the observations. There are also statistical methods that As a result, the activities in which analysts engage are can be applied to highlight or eliminate hypotheses based on flipped to 20 percent acquiring data and 80 percent analyzing the frequency of the observations upon which the hypotheses it, according to Kriz. are based.” “Their jobs are enhanced and not diminished by this process,” he said. “Analysts are constantly tweaking the data and models and are weeding out false positives to refine results Human Judgment over time. The intelligence gained by analysts over the years of doing their jobs is applied to this fine-tuning effort. The value Although advances in big data processing, cloud computof human judgment grows exponentially when used as part of ing, algorithms and machine learning have facilitated advances this analytic process flow.” O in geospatial predictive analytics, human judgment still looms large in solving these types of intelligence problems. “To take action you still need eyes on,” said Barlow. “Predictive processes are good at pointing out options. Humans still must For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly make the inferences and decisions that machines really aren’t at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives equipped to make. The consequences of taking action based on for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com. robots, drones and computers are fairly high.” www.GIF-kmi.com
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INDUSTRY RASTER Geospatial Portfolio Adds Enhanced Analytical Tools Intergraph has launched Intergraph Geospatial 2014, a comprehensive portfolio of technologies. Building upon the foundation introduced in 2013, the release provides enhanced analytical tools, mobile support and tremendous cost savings associated with managing big data. With an ongoing focus on a fully united, modern and dynamic product portfolio, this release synchronizes the technologies across all Intergraph product lines, thus broadening the reach and availability for fully integrated solutions for all users of geospatial information. The portfolio includes GeoMedia, ERDAS Imagine, ImageStation, ERDAS Apollo, GeoMedia Smart Client, GeoMedia WebMap, Geospatial Portal, Geospatial SDI, Intergraph Mobile MapWorks and Intergraph Mobile Alert. Key enhancements built within Intergraph Geospatial 2014 include features enabling users to create customized analytics, do real-time reporting in a mobile environment, and manage big data in the cloud. Stephanie Deemer stephanie.deemer@intergraph.com
Software to Support Sub-meter Imaging Satellites Exelis has announced that it will support data analysis of images from SkySat-1, the first in a planned constellation of 24 satellites from Skybox Imaging. Support for SkySat-1 will be available in the early 2014 release of the company’s ENVI image analysis software. The new sub-meter imaging satellites will make timely and valuable information about the Earth easily accessible to a wider range of end users for applications ranging from disaster response and resource management to national security and climate monitoring, among other things. ENVI image analysis software is a core offering of the Exelis ISR and Analytics strategic growth platform, providing customers analytics in commercial, intelligence and tactical military applications. The high resolution SkySat-1 imagery, combined with the ability to extract useful information with ENVI not immediately discernible by the human eye, means imagery can be used outside of traditional applications. Kristen Maglia kristen.maglia@exelisvis.com
Research Seeks Geo-Registration Accuracy Without GPS The Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded Northrop Grumman a phase three navigation system related contract to continue improving geo-registration accuracy for positioning and pointing applications, even in GPS-denied conditions. In the first two phases of the Maintain Accurate Geo-registration via Image-nav Compensation program, Northrop Grumman integrated georegistration algorithms in a vision-aided inertial navigation system. Having successfully demonstrated a prototype system in phase one and prepared for flight tests in phase two, the company will continue to develop capabilities for incorporating 3-D maps, improving performance and quantifying uncertainties associated with image-based navigation in phase three, as well as conduct additional test flights to prove real-time performance in realistic environments. The objective is to develop and demonstrate advanced realtime geo-registration and navigation algorithms using a combination of cameras, an inertial measurement unit and any available GPS information. Yolanda Murphy yolanda.murphy@ngc.com
Technology Optimizes Access to LiDAR Data Esri has developed technology to optimize light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data in the LAS format. The format enables fast and efficient access to LAS structured LiDAR data and is well suited both to desktop applications use and for archiving, storage and cloud based data distribution. Optimized LAS was built from the ground up with equal attention paid both to compression and the different modes of use. Esri’s compression technology reduces file size significantly more than generic compressors can because it was written specifically for LAS. Better compression results in reduced storage and bandwidth requirements. The LiDAR point record data is preserved exactly. There is no loss of information, so the full integrity of the data is maintained. The optimized LAS data can be used directly without need to decompress it first. The ArcGIS 10.2.1 platform has been enhanced to support optimized LAS. Esri LAS Optimization can be used free of charge, and ArcGIS is not required.
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Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
Tracking Antenna Systems Designed for Earth Observation TeleCommunication Systems (TCS) has announced the availability of its X/Y Tracking Antenna Systems. These precision systems are specifically designed for low-Earth-orbit and medium-Earth-orbit satellites in support of Earth observation, remote sensing, and telemetry, tracking and control applications. Initial orders are now shipping to small satellite operators that are offering a cost-effective and pervasive earth observation data solution. The reliable, field-proven X/Y Tracking Antenna Systems can be securely operated from anywhere in the world through the systems’ control and monitoring capability. The systems’ X/Y axis configuration eliminates the keyhole (lost data) effect that occurs with other tracking antennas when they cross through the zenith. Through TCS’ simplified design and advanced manufacturing techniques, a wide selection of antenna reflector and X/Y pedestal sizes in both deployable and trailered configurations are available, enabling customization while maintaining cost and delivery advantages. Meredith Allen mallen@telecomsys.com
Application Provides Track-Based Video Playback, Analysis
Remote GeoSystems has released LineVision Google Earth, a stand-alone application leveraging Google Earth for simple, multi-channel, track-based geographic video playback, analysis and project editing. LineVision Google Earth enables users to geospatially “navigate” a video recording by simply clicking a location along the aerial or terrestrial GPS track positioned in Google Earth. The video then automatically advances to that point in the video so that analysts and subject matter experts can visually interpret what was recoded at that specific place and time. As the video plays, a “cursor” moves along the GPS track, constantly indicating where the current view was recorded. If something of interest is detected in the video, users may also “snap” a still image from the video, which is geotagged and saved for future analysis. Operators of modern multi-sensor gimbal cameras and mobile video mapping platforms can synchronize playback of up to four simultaneously collected geospatial video files. Jeff Dahlke jeff@remotegeo.com www.GIF-kmi.com
Receiving Station Offers Multiple Imagery Capabilities Astrium has signed with GeoNorth on the first multimission direct receiving station (DRS), with a unique offering of both high-resolution and very high-resolution optical and radar satellite imagery capabilities. This new contract brings to nearly 40 the number of stations in the Astrium Services DRS network, the largest worldwide. The agreement will give GeoNorth the capability of priority tasking the Astrium Services satellite constellations to capture imagery anywhere on the globe and downlink data to its processing terminal located at the Alaska satellite facility in Fairbanks. It provides for a multi-satellite DRS that will draw on the SPOT (5 and 6), Pléiades (1A and 1B), TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X satellites, with resolutions across optical and radar products ranging from 0.25 m to 40 m. This is the ninth DRS contract Astrium Services has signed in 2013. These agreements establish either new DRS or upgrade existing DRS for compatibility with new satellites (SPOT 6, SPOT 7, TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X). This extensive global DRS network means customers can downlink imagery instantly each time a satellite passes over the stations, thereby ensuring rapid delivery of fresh data and services in near-real time.
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GIS Engineer
Q& A
Using Geospatial Data to Manage DoD’s Vast Properties David LaBranche Defense Installations Spatial Data Infrastructure Program Manager Office of the Secretary of Defense David LaBranche, P.E., is the Defense Installations Spatial Data Infrastructure (DISDI) program manager in the Office of the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Installations and Environment. The DISDI program is responsible for policy, guidance and oversight of each of the DoD components’ programs providing the geospatial information and services which support defense installations, environment, and range business missions. LaBranche holds a B.S. in civil engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a M.S. in environmental engineering from the University of New Hampshire. Prior to becoming a DoD civilian, he served for 20 years in a variety of positions as an officer in the Army Corps of Engineers. He is a licensed professional engineer with broad experience in civil and environmental engineering, including such areas as public works, environmental cleanup and surveying. From 2003 to 2005, he served as assistant professor of geospatial information science at the U.S. Military Academy. LaBranche was interviewed by GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly. Q: What is the mission of DISDI? A: We began as an initiative that grew out of BRAC 2005, but the story of DoD installations using GIS is about as old as GIS. What we had was a lot of installations using GIS, and growing that over time organically, and most of the time separate from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and its predecessors due to the unique requirements of installations as well as the Army civil works program. In 2005, this office was started by the deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment. We describe the “defense installations spatial data infrastructure” as the business mission capability of people, policy and practices used to acquire, steward and share installation, environment and range geospatial data. Our vision for DISDI is to provide authoritative, cost-effective installation geospatial information and services (IGI&S) for factbased decision making across the spectrum of DoD operations. The DISDI program is within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), so our traditional role is limited to policy, guidance and oversight. An important caveat to that, however, is that we are one of the few OSD programs that also has a small (but useful) operational function. In addition to currently writing a policy and providing oversight as the chair of a cross-service governance group, a significant portion of each week is spent in putting together geospatial data, or maps and products, for various directorates or senior leaders within OSD. Tying this back to our vision, the data and maps we provide is for the most part devoted to supporting the policy, oversight, and decision making activities in OSD. 16 | GIF 12.1
Q: What is the current status of the DISDI, and where do you see it going in the future? A: The program exists formally, and we have a modest budget line, but have yet to formally publish an overarching policy. I recently started the process of writing a DoD policy (instruction), subject to the usual review and approval timelines. We feel that it is important to take that step, to really have a department level policy that will tie together the requirements for installations and environment GIS, including civil works, and set a governance framework within which we can formally establish common standards and processes. Most importantly, we want to be sure that we commit to following the leadership roles of NGA and the DoD GEOINT manager, and to tie their processes in with what we are trying to do. We’re not doing anything to distance ourselves from NGA—in fact, quite the opposite. We want to be fully compliant with GEOINT standards, because it is useful to leverage those standards instead of making our own. We also find a lot of useful products and services from NGA. We just want to leverage that better and establish our unique community requirements for GEOINT, and an overarching policy will help us do that. Q: What are the current key programs and initiatives of the DISDI? A: I would start with our draft policy, which is what I’m spending a lot of time on these days, and the oversight role is related to policy. www.GIF-kmi.com
My second priority is standards, specifically the Spatial Data Standards for Facilities Infrastructure and Environment (SDSFIE). That grew from the ground up, starting back in the 1990s. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) did a great job over the years leveraging input from the military services, and developed it along with a CAD standard. In 2006, all the services agreed that it needed a big re-engineering. We completed that re-engineering, in version 3.0, in 2009. In 2013, we made version 3.1. Over the course of going from 3.0 to 3.1, each of the military services has been doing their own implementation of that standard and learning as we go. We incorporated lots of lessons learned into 3.1, and we’re beginning work on 4.0, also on the strength of what we’ve learned during implementation. The oversight function and my “action” function are what drive a third key initiative—an annual data call we do from the military services and Washington Headquarters Service (WHS). We put that data onto a web map viewer, the DISDI portal. The DISDI portal is the web map that is open to all authorized DoD users. It has brought a lot of visibility to the installation GIS data, and as we grow our user base and get more feedback from OSD and other staff, we’ve seen a marked increase in requests for specific maps or to add additional information to the map viewer. That’s been a great thing for us. So it’s both the traditional role and boots on the ground making things happen, showing people data and really putting GIS to work here at the headquarters level.
infrastructure—is still harder than it should be. We’ve worked with the DoD Chief Information Office, which has done a good job in recent years to establish joint standards that will reduce the differences with how the various network protocols work. The other big challenge is the budget. Resources have been going down for years, and all of the military service IGI&S programs would probably say they have reached their minimum point. We’ve definitely cut back on capabilities, and people are finding it hard to maintain the data we already have. We’re hoping that trend goes back up. In our case, we don’t require a lot of resourcing, because we are doing things in a very efficient way. It’s not a lot of money, but GIS still seems to be one of those things that people point to when budget cutting starts happening, and ask why we are bothering with that. The military service IGI&S programs have done the best job at showing their leadership what their value truly is. They can show concrete examples of how installation GIS is helping them save money on energy, for example, with remote sensing showing which buildings are the worst energy users. Or they can tie GIS data to other business systems, such as for asset accountability [which helps establish auditable asset records] or for infrastructure maintenance and repair. By demonstrating its relevance to day-to-day missions, they have successfully defended some of their budget to survive.
Q: How would you describe the DISDI’s net-centric strategy for implementing geospatial information sharing across the department?
A: We see a great need for SDSFIE, which is not currently used by NGA but which NGA did promote on our behalf to become a standard in the DoD Registry. For us, SDSFIE is our dictionary of geospatial data that is specifically built to help us do facilities management. That’s a very different thing from what NGA and its customers typically do. To be sure, they map buildings, but we need to know particular things about the building. And even when both agree on what attributes we need to know about a building, our community is the one using data which has to follow U.S. law, regulations or industry standards, because we’re using our GIS data to interface with asset management systems and COTS software. We have to file reports to federal agencies. In the environmental area, for example, our geospatial data depicting natural resources and environment features gets used to document our compliance with the Endangered Species Act, or the National Environmental Policy Act, or to comply with environmental restoration requirements. There are requirements based on laws and policies that don’t typically apply to NGA, whose focus is on mapping everything to a degree that warfighters or intelligence people find useful. We’re using that map for specific business functions. SDSFIE is where we capture those specific requirements. As it matures, what we foresee is greater integration with other NGA standards, and they have been very receptive and supportive of doing that. So far, OSD has funded a technical study that compares SDSFIE to the other NGA data standards. That gave us a good start, but showed us that there is still a lot of work to do. In terms of overlap, they’ve got some features, and we have some features that are basically the same thing. If we all want to work off a common standard, we need to get rid of that overlap. But doing the technical work to re-engineer our respective standards to get rid of the overlap is not trivial. Then there are under-lap areas, where we have some things mapped and they don’t, and would like to use our work. Or they may have things mapped that aren’t in our model, which we’d like to bring in. There is technical work still needed to do that harmonization. That’s for the future, when resources become available.
A: All federal agencies are looking to reduce costs and improve effectiveness, and GIS data and services are a great way to do that. But in order to get the most bang for the buck, you need to leverage net-centric capabilities. The map viewer on the DISDI portal, for example, has a capability to connect to other systems. So my map viewer is unique because it shows the installations of all military services. The Army has a map viewer, but they show only Army facilities, and the same is true with the other military services. So our portal is the one place where you can see everything, and thus we have provided net-centric services to a number of DoD systems and combatant commands. That’s especially true with NORTHCOM, because of their role in homeland defense. They don’t necessarily care about which military service is involved, but about a geographic area that has been affected or may be affected. They may be making a plan and want to know all of the DoD resources available for a given area. So making the data available or at least discoverable via net-centric means is probably the top goal of our DISDI portal system. It also saves time in updating data, since we could actually do that more frequently. Once I establish connections to the military services’ net-centric data, whenever they update, we will see it, and any customers we’re connected to. There won’t need to be an annual update, because the data will always be the best available. Q: What are some of the challenges you see in sharing geospatial data across the department? A: There are still significant differences among the ways that system and network administrators require security or system “handshakes.” In order to achieve net-centricity you have to connect systems, and connecting systems across network boundaries—even within the DoD www.GIF-kmi.com
Q: What role do you see for the SDSFIE in the future?
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Q: What divisions of responsibilities, and ways of coordinating, does your organization have with NGA? A: I’ve had a very strong working relationship with a number of NGA offices. It really starts at the top—my director, Mike Aimone, and I have had a number of meetings with the senior agency official for geospatial information, Dr. Michele Motsko, who represents DoD on the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC). In that role we want to be sure that our requirements on the installation and environment side are understood and represented through NGA to the FGDC. They have been very cooperative, and I actually have a voting seat at the coordination group level, as does the USACE, given that they have a separate civil works function that also uses or provides a lot of geospatial information. In addition, we are coordinating on the new policy on DISDI, with lots of agreement so far in the informal coordination process. I think that will continue and move forward, but there will always be terminology we have to agree on, and division of responsibilities is always going to be something that requires discussion. I would also say that NGA does a tremendous service to our community by providing many products, particularly imagery and other raster products such as elevation data. Our community uses that heavily, so we don’t have to spend a lot of money acquiring geospatial data sets that would otherwise be pretty pricey. As a result of my policy, I hope that we will continue to formalize relationships, where our requirements will become more part of their formal process of requirements for all forms of GEOINT. Q: How does your organization work with the service geospatial organizations? A: The programs include the Army’s Installation Geospatial Information and Services, the Marine Corps’ GeoFidelis, the Navy’s GeoReadiness, the Air Force’s GeoBase, the Washington Headquarters Service (which is responsible for managing the Pentagon reservation and other facilities in the national capital region), and the USACE, particularly in their role for civil works. These are the members of the DISDI Group, the IGI&S governance group which I chair. We are the ones who, by
consensus, are developing SDSFIE and other community standards to include a metadata standard. The SDSFIE is complex enough that it’s not always clear exactly how it should be implemented. We’ve come together as a group over the past six or seven years, and under this program’s leadership, we have produced a number of guidance and information documents. I coordinate policy through them, and they work with their organization’s leadership. Each of those programs is responsible for IGI&S within their service, which is really where the action is happening. Q: What are some of your other partnerships? A: In the past, we had a direct relationship with the Army Geospatial Center (AGC) Imagery Office, but it has evolved to a broader relationship with not only AGC, but also the USACE Engineer Research and Development Center. The DISDI portal is actually run by Corps of Engineers personnel, and on the Corps network. The reason is that they have a system called CorpsMap, which is a fantastic geospatial web service capability. Rather than inventing something new, we asked them to create an instance of it that was tailored to our DISDI requirements. We saved a great deal of development cost that way, and they have been supporting us with that for about eight years. I also leverage AGC to support the SDSFIE. They manage the contract to provide technical support to re-engineer and maintain the standard and its web page. That has tools where people can access the standard, learn more about how to implement it, and get help with a wide range of questions. The imagery support is still there, however. AGC acquires imagery in concert with NGA, and helps us discover available imagery and other geospatial resources. We are able to use their infrastructure to search for available resources, and they help our community members find imagery and other products. Installations are scattered all around the world, and it would be expensive to acquire that separately. If the imagery exists, we can discover it, and they can help us get a copy rather than buy something new. Q: What are some of the key ways that you work with industry?
April 2014 issue
The Voice of Military Communications and Computing
Features: • Special Report: NGA Program Review • Special Ops GEOINT • Modeling and Simulation • Commercial Remote Sensing • National Security IT
Cover and In-Depth Interview with:
Doug McGovern Director, InnoVision NGA
Bonus Distribution: GEOINT Symposium 18 | GIF 12.1
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A: Industry is essential to everything our community does, just as it is for NGA. To us, we look to industry to keep innovating, and we try to leverage the innovation as much as we can, because facilities management is one of those areas where people often don’t want to put a lot of money. So any way we can do those functions more cost effectively, we’re doing so. For us, industry is not just geospatial, but also the asset and facilities management industry, which provides commercial products that offer more efficient ways to do maintenance or inventory. Integrating that data with geospatial data is the nexus area where our community works. Another aspect of industry is environmental, since there is a lot of environmental management and compliance work done on installations. There are plenty of companies out there doing innovative work in mapping natural resources. We also have some critical needs to ensure that our installations remain viable in terms of mission. We have had a lot of encroachment issues over the years, where development gets too close to an installation or could be affected by air pollution, noise and other factors. Understanding the effect of military training operations around our installations—worldwide but especially in the U.S.—we’re using geospatial data to help solve problems and answer questions. So it’s important for us to keep up with the best trends in industry in how to collect and maintain that kind of spatial information.
Image Courtesy of f the DoD.
Q: What future or emerging mission benefits do you see for the use of GIS in the department?
A: One big area we’re seeing is about taking all of our geospatial information, such as detailed installation maps, and then going up a level and using that to create data sets about aggregated trends for, let’s say, energy usage or facility sustainment criteria. What we’re getting to is integrating all of that information, and then doing analysis. Again, our vision is to get accurate, standardized GIS data into the decision making process. Now that we have built a solid foundation of GIS data about our installations and operations, it is allowing us to try and solve some thorny questions more quickly and efficiently. Renewable energy, for example, is a national issue and a priority for this administration, and DoD needs to do its part to not be a roadblock. If someone is considering building a new wind farm, we want to know if that will have any impact on DoD operations. A lot of those questions are fundamentally spatial. A wind farm exists in a certain area, and has a certain height, so there are physical implications, for example on low-level flight or line-of-sight communications. Beyond that, there may be more complex potential impacts, such as sound or electromagnetic spectrum. So the faster we can assess whether proposed projects will affect DoD operations, the faster development can proceed. By the same token, it’s in our interest to protect our mission capabilities. If information was difficult to bring together in the past, maybe it didn’t get considered—we might have missed something. So our digital information, and the way we can make it more net-centrically available, is really where we’re going. O
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Activity Based Intelligence: The Hard Problems (Editor’s Note: The Activity Based Intelligence (ABI) Working Group of the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation recently developed a list of 16 “hard problems” facing ABI (http://usgif.org/system/uploads/2635/original/HardProbs_list.pdf). GIF asked executives of key companies in the field what they see as the “hardest” ABI problem, and how should it be addressed. Following are their responses.)
Tipping and Cueing Integrated solution provides automated, synergistic tipping and cueing across multiple sensors. By Eric Patterson Director of Laboratory Operations Riverside Research
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At Riverside Research, one of the areas we’re working on concerns the USGIF ABI Working Group’s Hard Problem #15: “Automated, synergistic tipping and cueing across multiple sensors in operationally relevant timelines.” As a not-for-profit company chartered to advance scientific research in the public interest and in support of the U.S. government, Riverside Research has been actively engaged in ABI from the first. We develop and teach Department of Defenseapproved education and training courses, as well as design, support and deliver ABI solutions to the intelligence community. Our Modeling and Application Development Lab (MAD Lab) provides satellite and aircraft mission planning and feasibility research systems to a wide range of customers. To assure ABI-ready mission planning systems, our MAD Lab is researching an integrated solution to provide automated, synergistic tipping and cueing across multiple sensors in operationally relevant timelines. Our solution leverages several existing Riverside Research approaches and research experiments designed to enhance our mission planning systems with this critical ABI facet in mind. In 2013, we initiated an effort to provide such a system capability through our independent research and development program. Although we already plan for multi-system,
multi-phenomenology satellite constellations, we needed a tipping and cueing mechanism that could tip the requirement deck, and ultimately the mission plan, using actionable intelligence to provide actionable intelligence. It’s easy to imagine an external tip generating a new collection requirement, but with a constellation of collectors at our fingertips, how do we ensure that the right asset is tasked to perform the collection quickly? Our answer was to architect flexible tipping and cueing content that could simply request the next available collection or provide specific collection constraints. Once a tip is received, the system uses the tip parameters, quickly down-selects the constellation, identifies the collection opportunity, and schedules the collection. Our first step was to use constraints, such as last time information of value, interpretability, confidence, priority and others, to help identify the optimum collector and how to rank the tip for collection. As automated analytical systems flourish, so do the number of tips—and not all tips are created equal. The next step of matching system capabilities with target attributes to further refine the down-select was a little harder. The target type could require a specific collector for a specific phenomenology or a range of phenomenologies. Also, to exploit target attributes such as motion or temperature, the system will select the best capability
to observe those characteristics. These and other apportionment strategies allow us to prioritize the needs and ensure we use our assets effectively and efficiently. Most of today’s ABI efforts are focused on the automated analysis of massive traditional and nontraditional data sources to discover patterns and observables (activities) that help focus our human analytical processes. Our theory is that if we connect this system to the warfighter eyewitness, we will be able to beat the automated analysis timeline. To this end, we added a capability that allows the witness to tip collection from a mobile device. Using image bonus algorithms, we account for the possibility of several war-fighters requesting a collection of the same event. The system recognizes overlapping requests to prevent over-tasking assets and burying us further with redundant data. Once our mission planning tool schedules the collection based on a tip from an analytical engine, eyewitness or other source, the system cues the requestor and other systems downstream that the collect is planned. Closing the gap between the collection and analytic elements is just as critical as getting the next collection. If we plan a collect based on a high priority, high confidence tip, why shouldn’t the “tipper” be ready to use the new data to refine its assessment? As ABI, artificial intelligence and collection technology continue to evolve, so www.GIF-kmi.com
too will our mission planning methodologies. All of these advancements help support automated, synergistic tipping and cueing across multiple
Connecting the Dots Faster For the power of ABI to be fully harnessed by the IC at large, the community must continue to encourage and facilitate information sharing. By Mike Manzo Director for GEOINT Mission Processing & Exploitation General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems
ABI’s People Problem The ABI community’s efforts to standardize human behavior simply cannot be accomplished by advances in technology alone. By Peder Jungck Vice President and Chief Technology Officer BAE Systems Intelligence & Security sector www.GIF-kmi.com
sensors in operationally relevant timelines. Riverside Research continues to explore new and innovative ways to enhance our existing solutions or to
provide new ones, and continuing our legacy of supporting and advancing our customers “in the best interests of the United States of America.”
The intelligence community is inundated with prolific amounts of data each and every day. With sources ranging from SIGINT, HUMINT, imagery, full motion video and social media platforms, our nation’s analysts are tasked with the daunting responsibility of sorting through these disconnected sources of data to derive and connect actionable intelligence in order to keep our country and our allies safe—the proverbial needle in the haystack. As the volume of data continues to increase, rapidly deploying ABI solutions is a priority for many IC decision makers. With intelligence pulled from a variety of sources across cyber, geospatial, signal and human intelligence, ABI goes well beyond simply collecting data and storing it. By introducing the tradecraft of analyzing the patterns of life, ABI enhances the dimensions and context of
mission-critical information for analysts, while highlighting areas where more information is required. ABI allows analysts to connect the dots faster and more efficiently and, most importantly, provide decision makers with real-time intelligence. At General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, we have invested in systems and solutions over the past five years that promote and enhance ABI tradecraft, analysis and exploitation. We have developed a cloudbased environment that mirrors the IC infrastructure, allowing us to federate disparate, stovepiped data stores to create a seamless, comprehensive, nonlinear system where timely and relevant information is readily available and easily accessible by the entire analyst community. By setting up a foundation that lets our customers easily discover what data they have and what data they need while
simultaneously deriving actionable intelligence, we are putting the power and promise of ABI directly in the hands of users today. Additionally, with the rollout of GDNexus, we are providing an online-based innovation gateway that allows us to partner with industry-leading technology providers to quickly deliver proven solutions directly to our customer’s ABI mission decks. From innovative concept to operations, GDNexus helps our customers reduce acquisition risk, increase operational capability and leverage proven technology to take their ABI solutions to the next level. For the power of ABI to be fully harnessed by the IC at large, the community must continue to encourage and facilitate information sharing. Only through collaboration will the full potential of ABI be realized.
The USGIF’s list of “hard problems” associated with ABI includes a number of interesting challenges, but the one problem that will be the most difficult to overcome is actually the last one on the list: “Integrated work flow composition to enable responsive analysis capabilities.” Unlike some of the other technology-specific problems such as alert automation, activity modeling and gravitometry, the problem surrounding workflow may be the most difficult to solve, as it is a people problem. The ABI community’s efforts to standardize human behavior simply cannot be accomplished by advances in technology alone.
To understand the challenges in addressing workflow, one only has to look at what ABI was designed to do. ABI is not a tool, a technology, a process, a collection system, or even a “capability.” At its core, ABI can be broken into three parts: analysis, analytics and analysts: Analysis is the deductive reasoning approach an analyst uses. Analytics involves the big data tools and algorithms that automate the large sets of data that empower analysts to identify human patterns and anticipate actions. ABI also requires multiple Analysts working concurrently who are well trained and
experienced in using each of the two previous points for problem solving purposes. ABI is empowering analysts to reject traditional problem solving approaches and adopt radical processes and organizational constructs to address the hard problems of the IC. It was never intended to be a linear problem solving solution, and one thing we can’t change is teaching humans to think non-linearly. Another challenge in addressing ABI workflows is that each ABI analyst’s experience is unique. To establish a workflow, one would have to know exactly how ABI is being used by each analyst, every given day. This is simply GIF 12.1 | 21
impossible. Analysts are continuously integrating ABI into their problem solving processes in new and interesting ways. Further, with each new sensor and subsequent technological advance, new problemsolving approaches become possible. ABI’s ability to adapt and grow with an intelligence enterprise is making efforts to define workflow virtually impossible, as the processes analysts employ are constantly changing. The impact of advanced analytics is not solely being felt in the IC. We’ve seen examples of this in many areas outside government, including professional sports. For example, Major League Baseball teams
operated solely on the collected wisdom of their own analysts, or scouts. But that all changed in 2002, when the Oakland Athletics began supplementing their human assessments with rigorous statistical analysis commonly referred to as sabermetrics. While big data tools helped analysts collect and identify patterns, it was the human analyst that pinpointed the correlation between a player’s on-base and slugging percentage and the player’s likely impact on a team’s offensive success. Like ABI, sabermetrics is continuing to evolve, and just as sabermetrics is changing the face of baseball, the work analysts are doing
today with ABI is ultimately shaping the future of intelligence analysis. Responsive analysis processes, like sabermetrics and ABI, require analysts to practice open-ended problem solving as a routine way of doing business. Analysts simply cannot have their thought processes automated. As such, I see the problem of workflow as one of ABI’s real enduring challenges. In time, each of the other 15 hard ABI problems identified by USGIF will be solved by software, algorithms, visualization tools, database software and countless other advances in technology. But the problem surrounding workflow may never be resolved.
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Multi-INT Correlation Time data assets help tackle ABI challenges. By Wayne Chesley Vice President and General Manager TransVoyant LLC
ABI presents difficult challenges and opportunities for the U.S. national security mission. ABI can be defined as a discipline of intelligence where subject matter experts (SMEs) and subsequent intelligence collection are focused on the activity and transactions associated with an entity, population, set of behaviors, or area of interest individually or in combination. Using ABI, the intelligence community can identify patterns, trends, networks and relationships, and make real-time predictive and prescriptive decisions, from large data collections and multiple sources. These collections may include multi-spatial imagery, infrared, radar and foundation data. I’ve chosen to offer thoughts on this challenge identified by the USGIF: “Rapid and relevant multi-INT correlation across disparate sources (including unformatted/unregulated and non-temporal/non-spatial data).” ABI does not focus on specific targets. Rather, it focuses on events, movements and transactions in order to proactively identify risks, threats and opportunities in a given area. The ultimate objective of ABI is to proactively understand and then alter or mitigate actions or behaviors before risks or bad activities occur. The problem is that SMEs and analysts are overwhelmed by the volume of inputs received to accomplish ABI. Moreover, this voluminous input is fragmented and spread over multiple sensors and systems. Solutions and capabilities are needed that integrate, correlate and automatically analyze input received in order to do some of the “analysts’ analysis.” Massively scalable in-memory analytics technologies such as TransVoyant’s GeoVigilance provide real-time multi-source correlation, temporal alignment,
and automatic or analyst-driven decision support, all of which are fundamental capabilities enabling globally scalable ABI. These technologies process and examine high volume and high velocity multi-dimensional data, correlate it, run complex rules (algorithms) and present activity and/or behavioral outcomes to the analyst. Using their expertise, analysts create rules that identify both simple and very complex conditions of interest against live and historical data. Alerts and notification processes ensure that when these events or conditions of interest occur, the right action officers or decision-makers are made aware of the risk or opportunity. This enables responsive, even proactive actions as a result of ABI efforts. These actions focus on altering behavior “left of the risk or opportunity.” Based on historical information extracted from “big data” archives, intelligence experts can make existing rules better, or create new, more relevant conditions of interest. Take the following example: Using his or her experience, an analyst can collect relevant information from known sources after an attack on an embassy. Patterns and correlations detected in connection with that event enable creation of rules and algorithms that alert authorities in real time of the reoccurrence of these warning signals. The emergence of affordable, in-memory real-time and historical analytics technologies automate anticipatory analysis against “now” data by generating alerts, anomaly detection, change detection, object identification, and other information gathering. The math and the results can be shared globally and instantly. The rules and algorithms are in effect 24/7,
looking for risks or opportunities with or without human intervention. Analysts can walk away from their terminals and work other priority tasks. The intelligence enterprise can begin to optimize its ABI efforts and reduce the suboptimal activities associated with too much looking backward, and instead look forward in time. Successful ABI should include a healthy dose of historical, real-time, and predictive analytics with a laser focus on outcomes. Identifying the most important conditions of interest, trends and patterns based on real-time, multiple data streams is critical to creating a library of algorithms and rules that optimize our best intelligence SMEs. These rules enhance ongoing collection efforts. They also promote process efficiency by filtering out enormous amounts of data that do not satisfy the dynamic analytics contained in the rules and algorithms. The library of rules created by our country’s best analysts can be available to all SMEs, presenting the opportunity to further labor efficiencies and enabling the enterprise to dig deeper into its mission. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency officials have made clear that ABI now stands at the heart of the NGA’s mission. This new ABI analytics approach is a step in the right direction, promoting the discovery of conditions of interest in time to provide actionable intelligence to decision-makers. The USGIF’s list of hard problems should give us all pause. It is vital that we use our collective technology resources to address them in a way that makes anticipatory and “now” analysis the norm in those agencies that are structuring the rules and algorithms that will save lives tomorrow. O
For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
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Defense and intelligence agencies seek better ways to organize and sort through large volumes of structured and unstructured data. By William Murray, GIF Correspondent Like a peacekeeping unit trying to constrain irregular forces that are all that much more difficult to control because they fail to fall within the conventional military categories of organization and command, the military and intelligence communities are struggling to get a handle on the unstructured data that is coming at them from a bewildering variety of sources. Defense contractors are working with defense and intelligence agencies in a budget-constrained environment to better organize and sort through large volumes of structured and unstructured data. It could be from UAVs, social media networks, audio and video files recorded by intelligence operatives and large enterprise networks with thousands of Excel, PDF and Word documents. “Organizations are dealing with terabytes of data, when formerly they might have had gigabytes of data, and exabytes when they used to deal with petabytes,” said Gene Zapfel, group vice president for Department of Defense and intelligence at Unisys Federal, which is helping the military work with big data. “From a technical perspective, a lot of our clients are getting overwhelmed by the amount of data,” said Peter Guerra, principal in the Strategic Innovations Group at Booz Allen Hamilton, referring to enterprise networks. “Data warehousing can’t handle it all.” Working with the Army, Booz Allen has used advanced analytics capabilities to integrate and deliver advanced intelligence capabilities to soldiers operating in remote locations. The growth in big data in the Department of Defense comes as the result of a confluence of the growth of data from UAVs and 24 | GIF 12.1
other sensors, as well as the growth in visual and text files and other unstructured data, said Dave Ryan, vice president of the Intelligence Systems Division at Northrop Grumman. It remains to be seen whether the end of the Iraq War and the drawdown in Afghanistan will result in less UAV data, since the U.S. military is committing fewer conventional ground troops and restricting its footprint outside the continental U.S. to a more rapidly deployable one, capable of responding to emerging threats.
Actionable Data As opposed to the operational scenarios in Afghanistan and Iraq, DoD officials are now hunting for high value targets and terrorists in enemy nation states with fewer boots on the ground, according to Ryan, trying to find actionable data without the advantages of being able to fly drones over large swaths of land. Some data is clearly coming from human intelligence activities. Northrop Grumman works on a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) contract through which the company helps officials provide better structure on unstructured data and make sorting through both structured and unstructured data more seamless. “What makes big data different from traditional data is the diverse nature of the data, as it is coming from video surveillance, Web trends, mobile phones, consumer behavior, social media and so on, and the speed at which that data is coming in,” said Greg Gardner, chief architect of defense solutions at NetApp, a storage system and data software vendor. www.GIF-kmi.com
president for application modernization and data “Not only that, most of the data growth that analytics at Unisys Federal. “Where we are at, I comprises big data is unstructured, such as video, a believe, is establishing a technology infrastructure stream of digital data typically stored in a file that to help us link and analyze this data.” lacks fixed fields, is hard to search, is unstructured Companies such as Unisys can build analytand hard to manage,” Gardner said. ics engines that military users can utilize in trackA combination of automation and human knowing such intelligence. “This area is very complex,” how can produce the right result for some organiZapfel said. “We need a combination of data scienzations, but finding the right mix isn’t easy. tists and subject matter experts [in intelligence] to “We don’t believe there’s a silver bullet” to the succeed. That’s the way we approach it.” issue of unstructured data and software capabiliGene Zapfel Data scientists from companies such as Unisys ties, said Steve Matthews, vice president of federal can respond to the particular needs of DoD and business development at Active Navigation, a softintelligence agencies to integrate the data analytics ware company focused on the discovery and transengine that Unisys has already developed and inteformation of unstructured data for organizations grate with any DoD or intelligence agency in-house that has found a niche in helping large enterprises data warehouses. such as DoD eliminate redundant, obsolete, and The military might be able to take advantage of trivial information. new ways to acquire data analytics tools, given the “Software can do 90 percent of the work, but we popularity and acceptance of the reasonable secutry to let the experts [within the military] do the rity risks related to cloud-based computing. The rest,” Matthews said. Office of the Secretary of Defense, formerly held “We give intelligence analysts tools,” said Ryan. back by the cost and time to build infrastructure, is The ubiquity of access to enterprise network data Peter Guerra trying different approaches to acquire data analytthrough a cloud architecture has security perils, ics as a service, according to Fontecilla. but also holds a significant upside in enabling ana“We’re not seeing large requests for proposals lysts and other users to work more efficiently and (RFPs), but rather proofs of concepts in DoD. We’re effectively. “The advantages are significant to the doing a lot of face to face meetings with military cloud architecture,” Ryan said. leaders. They may or may not buy big data through “Imagine swallowing the Internet every day and an RFP. They may purchase it as a service,” he said. having to find the needle in the haystack,” Ryan According to Zapfel, Unisys has flexibility in said. delivering data analytics capabilities to military DoD officials sometimes need to find patterns organizations. “We can work on premise with the between data that could include audio and video client or we can deliver it as an Amazon-style serfiles, social media, and other data written in many vice,” he said. The latter service is one that DoD languages, trying to find time-sensitive correlaand intelligence users can largely operate on their tions between persons, places and things. “A lot Dave Ryan own, with contractors such as Unisys providing as of data doesn’t have metadata standards,” Ryan needed support. observed, adding that open source data is becomUnisys Federal is no stranger to big data, ing more valuable to DoD and intelligence officials. Fontecilla noted. For more than 15 years, Unisys While there is much focus on unstructured has worked with what is today the Department of data, there’s a “ton of structured data coming from Homeland Security, building and maintaining an drones, UAVs, planes and shipping containers.” Said Oracle data warehouse with relational databases Zapfel of Unisys, which holds a contract with Air and applications that now hosts more than 1.3 bilForce Transportation Command to provide DoD lion transactions of data each day. shipping services. Moreover, the military can benRyan pointed to how Apple iTunes categorizes efit by better predictive weather modeling in shipand sorts songs for its users to metadata’s tagping, since more accurate modeling can lead to ging conventions, which makes it easier for users millions in fuel cost savings. Rod Fontecilla to sort through large volumes of data. He noted In such a scenario, the integration between that Northrop Grumman has created a tool that structured data with other structured data in a way enables government users to search a video for a particular that can produce meaningful information is a challenge, said word or phrase, an example of tagging unstructured data, which Zapfel, who is clear about the way forward. “The only way is big enables intelligence analysts to find the “needle in the haystack,” data tools,” he said. whether it be in a foreign language television or radio broadcast or an audio or video recorded through traditional human intelliAnalytics Tools gence means. The tools for exploitation and extraction of meaningful data Data analytics tools can help intelligence analysts better from unstructured data sources such as video have improved, respond to emerging threats. “Intelligence analysts are looking at said Guy Swope, technical director for Raytheon Intelligence Twitter, blogs, Facebook and other social media for the bad guys, and Information Systems’ Data Analytics Center. The challenge because that’s where many of them are,” said Rod Fontecilla, vice www.GIF-kmi.com
GIF 12.1 | 25
for many DoD organizations and their supporting contractors, according to Swope, involves the extraction of meaningful data and the correlation of other data sources to find data that provides context or further information about the initial data discovered. “The key question is whether pieces of data are related to each other,” Swope said. Sensing an ongoing market need, Raytheon has developed four Intersect big data analytics products, including Intersect Dimensions, which enables users to use two-dimensional data to create a richer 3-D model. A second product, Intersect Sentry, can enable intelligence analysts to “set and forget” the product as it monitors a stream of data from multiple intelligence sources for particular metrics or patterns, freeing up the analyst’s time. “We have made huge strides in the last few years with data standards and our ability to analytically sort through large volumes of data in milliseconds,” Ryan said. “One person’s treasure is another person’s trash.”
license plate and checking the number against a database of known adversaries, or hunting for the next IED in theater by having machines process algorithms in real time. “On a broad scale, data is growing,” Guerra said. “DoD has tons of sensors.” Being able to analyze unstructured data from multiple sources is also a challenge. “DoD has a lot of data silos,” Guerra said. Pulling together data from various sources changes how DoD works, according to Guerra, who has worked with Booz Allen for seven years, and it also has security and policy implications. In addition, more efficient analysis of unstructured data in real time and near real time can also make intelligence analysts’ jobs much easier on the mission side. The Army Chief Information Office, currently under acting CIO Mike Krieger, has taken significant measures to help commands reduce their data clutter through his Enterprise Content Program.
Records Management
Cloud Architecture
Following bad publicity that came after the loss of soldiers’ combat service records, which can affect veterans benefits, Active Navigation has helped the Army better manage records of military personnel who have served in combat, particularly as they transition out of the military, Matthews suggested. “Not all data is good data,” Matthews said, making reference to a digital copy of a Batman movie found on Army computers during the Afghanistan drawdown, as the service was trying to migrate important data to a cloud for storage. Clearly, that organization didn’t need to keep the movie during its transitioning of data from the enterprise network in Afghanistan to a cloud architecture. “It’s garbage in and garbage out” for many organizations, Matthews said. Working with the U.S. Central Command, Active Navigation officials helped the command reduce its data in several enterprise networks by 50 percent, through performing a detailed analytics of data, including unstructured data found in terabytes worth of Excel, PDF, PowerPoint and Word documents that were being processed at the rate of 100,000 to 150,000 documents a minute during the Afghanistan War drawdown, according to Matthews. Tagging such documents helps make them more usable within an enterprise network. For example, through the metadata analysis of a series of situation reports from Afghanistan made possible after tagging unstructured data through Active Navigation’s software, Army officials were able to determine that a number of soldiers coming back from patrols were reporting the need to be vigilant about insurgents and their allies using rice bags as covers for covering improvised explosive devices. “Before the metadata analysis, all of those incidents weren’t previously joined up,” Matthews said. The ability to share such actionable data can save lives. Matthews noted that video and other data from UAVs is frequently considered to be structured data, since much of it has geospatial tagging data. “Videos from UAVs usually have positional data and metadata,” said Booz Allen’s Guerra. “Parts of them are structured.” One challenge that DoD officials have is real-time object recognition. Operational scenarios could include scanning of a car
Matthews said that the demand for his company’s services within DoD has climbed significantly the last 18 months, following the end of the Iraq War and the drawdown in Afghanistan. Working with data in a DoD enterprise cloud hosted by the Defense Information Systems Agency, for example, Active Navigation officials helped DoD act to prevent potential Wikileaks-like data compromises and identify sensitive and classified data where personal identifiable information needed to be scrubbed from documents. “Organizations only want to pay for information that is useful, particularly as they transition to a cloud architecture,” Matthews said. Such an architecture, which has become highly favored in many parts of DoD, requires that enterprises pay for the storage of data on servers connected to the Internet behind password-protected firewalls, with pricing set by the volume of data stored and amount of time the service is used. Reducing redundant, obsolete and trivial information in an enterprise is ongoing work, and Matthews compared it to cleaning up a garage, which can become cluttered within weeks or months after an initial cleaning up. Engaging in the process just once, as anyone who has tried keep a tidy work desk can attest, is an ongoing job. Metalogix Software, meanwhile, has seen SharePoint environments in DoD and the intelligence communities grow drastically with data, according to Pat Park, the company’s director of public sector. The company has moved decisively to meet market demand. “Metalogix moves just the metadata of the unstructured data into SharePoint and then moves the Binary Large Object to lowercost alternate storage. By having just the metadata in SharePoint, you are able to organize, search, and manage the data in a single content management system without causing performance slowdowns,” he said. O
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For more information, contact GIF Editor Harrison Donnelly at harrisond@kmimediagroup.com or search our online archives for related stories at www.gif-kmi.com.
www.GIF-kmi.com
GIF RESOURCE CENTER Advertisers Index American Military University. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 www.publicsafetyatamu.com/gif BAE Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, C4 www.baesystems.com/gxp General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . C2 www.gd-ais.com MetaVR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 www.metavr.com Riverside Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 www.riversideresearch.org Sony. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . C3 www.sony.com/4kprojection Space Foundation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 www.spacesymposium.org/gi1
Compiled by KMI Media Group staff
Calendar March 23-28, 2014 Geospatial Power in Our Pockets Louisville, Ky. www.asprs.org/conferences April 14-17, 2014 GEOINT Symposium Tampa, Fla. http://usgif.org May 5-9, 2014 SPIE Defense Security & Sensing Exhibition Baltimore, Md. www.spie.org
NEXT ISSUE
May 19-22, 2014 Space Symposium Colorado Springs, Colo. www.spacefoundation.org May 19-21, 2014 Location Intelligence Washington, D.C. www.locationintelligence.net July 14-18, 2014 Esri International User Conference San Diego, Calif. www.esri.com
March 2014 Volme 12, Issue 2
The Voice of Military Communications and Computing
Cover and In-Depth Interview with:
Mark S. Chandler Deputy Director for Intelligence, J2 Joint Staff (invited)
Features: • Mobile Apps • Polar GEOINT • Intelligence Exploitation • Aerial Imagery • Intelligence Reorganization
Insertion Order Deadline: February 20, 2014 • Ad Material Deadline: February 27, 2014
www.GIF-kmi.com
GIF 12.1 | 27
INDUSTRY INTERVIEW
Geospatial Intelligence Forum
John Yokley President, Chief Executive Officer and Founder PTFS John Yokley has over 30 years of experience in the field of engineering management and information systems in support of government and industry. He established PTFS in 1995 to service the federal government and support the management of the increasing growth rate of information by providing and supporting digital content management solutions and related services. He launched multiple new vertical market strategies in 2006 and expanded the ArchivalWare Enterprise Content Management System (CMS) software product line to support digital library markets and exploit emerging geospatial intelligence and government declassification requirements. Q: How and why did PTFS become engaged in the geospatial marketplace? A: Content management, as well as library and information science, is a core company competency. In 2006, we sought out niche areas that required CMS but needed additional capabilities to satisfy unique user groups. We believe that the flexibility of a core CMS product tailored to perform unique geospatial content management provides users a platform that readily supports their changing requirements over time. This flexibility and the product’s origin are also the reasons that our solutions support multi-INT requirements so easily. Today we have four such niche areas, including geospatial. The most time-consuming part of leveraging our product to support geospatial requirements was developing significant corporate expertise in the domain area. This is a prerequisite for successful product development. After that, in some cases it is just a matter of configuring the software with the proper product type and metadata support. We have developed support for hundreds of product types since we introduced the product in 2001. It’s worth noting that we have customers outside the Department of Defense and intelligence community that have also helped to form and influence our geospatial product development roadmap and enhancements developed over the last several years. 28 | GIF 12.1
Q: Where do you deliver value to the intelligence community, and where do you see the company moving in the future to support it? A: PTFS provides geospatial and multiINT content management functionality to significantly improve analyst productivity as well as support the major pillars of activity based intelligence (ABI). The company has five business units. They include ArchivalWare COTS CMS, which supports the ArchivalWare application including the mission specific modules mentioned above; Systems Engineering/ Integration, which builds large CMS solutions and manages data migrations/standardizations to meet a diverse set of DoD/ IC requirements; and Library Systems and Open Source Solutions, which develops around, hosts and supports Koha, an open source integrated library system solution. This business unit currently hosts 500 libraries and research centers in the cloud. In addition, Digitization and Content Conversion converts a diverse set of hardcopy paper and analog media types into digital content including a high volume of sensitive data, while Professional Services and Staffing staffs operations the government has decided to outsource. Our business units work together to provide integrated, turn-key information management solutions to the community. In the future, PTFS plans to continue developing its ArchivalWare open architecture, 100 percent browser-based product with new capabilities and features based on user feedback and trends in our client’s technical approach. Providing CMS as a service is a major component of our strategy to support modular systems design and cloud initiatives. We will
continue to support and develop around open standards such as OGC (WCS/CSW), OAI-PMH, SWORD, Z39.50 and others to provide a CMS integration platform to support partner analytical tools. PTFS envisions a lot of data management migrating to the cloud, which will require cloud based CMS security capabilities that we provide now but that will be improved and refined as lessons are learned from major cloud data migration initiatives. Finally, we will advance our current Smart Data Package ability to enhance ingested data. Once we make data “smarter,” our techniques will allow the data to find the appropriate users after authentication is complete. Q: Is partnering with other companies important to PTFS› long-term growth strategy? A: Yes, we seek out partners who focus on requirements that are synergistic with our product/service offerings. We would prefer to have close relationships with a small number of companies we know and trust rather than many partners that are “one and done.” We currently have strong strategic partnerships with a diverse set of companies ranging from large system integrators to small businesses. We sometimes work closely with technology partners and tightly integrate their offerings when it makes more sense to buy rather than build to meet unique requirements. Q: Does PTFS support ABI initiatives? A: PTFS is currently refining capabilities in our product to enhance support for initiatives in all ABI pillars, especially data and sequence neutrality. Specific enhancements are planned in geo-referencing non-geospatial products as well as full motion video support to more rapidly allow analysis to be performed. Some of these new capabilities will be showcased at the GEOINT Symposium in April in Tampa, Fla. We will also be launching ArchivalWare GS 5.0, the newest release of our geospatial CMS, at GEOINT. O www.GIF-kmi.com
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