KEYWORDS: Sensors, Telecommunications, Intelligence systems, Local area networks, Web services, Global Positioning System, Data modeling, Distributed computing, Clocks, Computer architecture
Advances in networking and communications make the dream of a highly connected mobile war fighter, persistent
networked sensors, and distributed command and control a reality. However, being able to communicate is only the first
part of the problem. The ability to easily communicate with a wide variety of highly distributed sensors and systems
presents significant new problems that need to be addressed. First, an application must discover what services are
available and establish communications with the desired services. Secondly, time synchronization across all of the
networked systems is critical to correctly correlating the information into a coherent picture. In addition, maintaining
data consistency in a highly distributed environment is an extremely challenging problem. Given the amount of data
available clients must be able to subscribe to specific data in order to avoid information/system overload. Finally the
information must be presented to the user in a form and on a platform well suited to the task at hand. All of these
problems, and many more, must be solved in order to deliver a truly effective net-centric C4ISR system.
A software architecture will be presented that attempts to solve the issues described above. The architecture inherently
includes many features designed to address these issues. In addition, the user can select data from a wide variety of
services, both local and remote and control how it is accessed, processed, and displayed. A detailed analysis of each of
these techniques and how it impacts the effectiveness of the system will be discussed.
The rapid dissemination of information to both the warfighter and analyst is critical on the modern battlefield. In addition, the tools used to analyze and display the information must be accurate, reliable, and consistent, independent of the platform, or deployment methodology currently being used. Displayed information includes raw sensor data, processed/fused sensor data, results of analysis, friendly force location and status, local context, and a variety of other data. This document presents a software architecture that is capable of displaying information in a consistent fashion across a number of application architectures, deployment scenarios, and target devices.
KEYWORDS: Geographic information systems, Visualization, Associative arrays, Sensors, Data archive systems, Computer architecture, Web services, Robotics, Military display technology, Java
Spatial data is of crucial importance to situation awareness in the battlefield. As geo-located data from local sensors and global intelligence is gathered and made available, it becomes necessary to route, filter, analyze and present information for decision-making. GIS provides the most intuitive platform for manual/visual correlation of all the gathered information. Too often, presentation applications are tightly coupled with a GIS which limits their use of new GIS products as they emerge. This paper presents a technique for abstracting client applications from the underlying map display to accommodate the many different GIS applications used by military programs.
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