Web's Wide World
Written by Cheryl Gerber
THE GEOWEB REPRESENTS THE CONVERGENCE
OF INTERNET TECHNOLOGY, GIS TOOLS AND
A RAPIDLY GROWING NUMBER OF SERVICES.
The Geoweb can be defined as the convergence of Internet and Web technology, GIS tools and a rapidly growing number of Geoweb services, according to Kathy Wever, deputy director of the eGEOINT Management Office, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
Industry success with location-based technology such as Global Positioning System in cars and cell phones or tools such as Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth either mirror or augment technology advancements within the Department of Defense and intelligence community.
“The successful monetization and deployment of location-based services give us greater latitude—pun intended—within the DoD and IC for net-centric implementations of the Geoweb. They give us more options,” said Eric Schwarz, technology director of information integration within NGA’s InnoVision Directorate.
Just as the industry and public use of geo-location data and technology has soared, so has the use of geo-information services and sharing within the national security sector. “We’re seeing an explosion of location-based services within DoD and IC, such as geolocation information embedded in technology and work force sharing of location-informed content,” said Wever.
The growth of increasingly geo-aware information on the Internet has enhanced the open source intelligence (OSINT) process of seeking, selecting and acquiring information from publicly available sources for the DoD and IC common operational picture (COP). However, it comes with a constant, needle-in-the-haystack problem.
The COP provides both a single interface shared by more than one command and a framework in which to transfer disparate information easily. It facilitates collaborative planning and synchronization for situational awareness, and via a geographic user interface, the COP shows the sum of military assets. MARKUP LANGUAGE
Still, neither OSINT nor COP is likely to reap continuous, real-time, easily shared, actionable geo-intelligence until the more significant furtherance of Web 2.0.
Historically, most geospatial information sharing has been ad hoc and not automated. “The use of Extract Transform Load [ETL] automated the ad hoc process, but ETL is coarse-grained and has no automated detection of changes,” said Ron Lake, chairman and chief executive officer of Galdos Systems.
Lake invented Geography Markup Language (GML) to provide a language for expressing geographic entities, creating applicationspecific geographic vocabularies and supporting geospatial queries and transactions across the Internet. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OCG) has used GML as a protocol for a crucial Geoweb OGC standard, the Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard, which provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the Web using platform-independent calls.
Galdos offers software and services that include a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) framework, which consists of software connectors enabling the publication/subscription relationship between databases, applications and other databases. The capability will provide the means to share geospatial information instantly on the Web.
The company is focused on integrating the Geoweb into existing non-spatial Web services, SDI planning and deployment as well as XML and GML development. One of its building blocks is Indicio, a geospatial Web registry for service-oriented architectures (SOAs) that matches resources through the dynamic discovery of Web-based services and geospatial data. Another is Cartalinea, a scalable Web-service application that is standards-compliant and allows for user-defined, real-time responses to changes in geographic data.
However, the widespread ability to capture changes to geographic or geospatial data is one of the chief impediments to the realization of the Geoweb. “There’s no software or process to allow geospatial changes or updates to be moved beyond the local area where they were captured,” said Lake. “Data changes and integration should happen automatically. Wherever the data is created or modified, it should be captured directly into a larger database, not just a local database.” Lake envisions a software infrastructure that detects changes in local databases, captures the changes and propagates them to subscribers automatically. “Our view of SDI was that it had to go beyond just cataloging spatial resources. It should be dynamic, provide real-time information and therefore be capable of business process integration and database synchronization,” he said.
Content gathering, in the meantime, continues full steam ahead. Once reserved for cartographers and GIS specialists, geographic and geospatial information is now amassing at breakneck speed along with the growth of data on the Internet. “Every second there are 80 new public Web pages created. And there is a hundred times more content created inside, so the world is this giant, screaming fire hose of unstructured data,” said John Frank, chief technology officer of MetaCarta.
SERVICES PARADIGM
Behind the constantly gushing content on the Geoweb and Internet, the software development tide has been turning toward Web-based technology such as SOA. “We see software development moving from a systems-based paradigm to a servicesbased paradigm with SOA,” said Schwarz.
SOA is a collection of services that interoperate between different systems and programming languages via application programming interfaces (APIs) and messages. Data flow is maintained in federated data warehouses that allow new elements to reference a common format.
Web services, SOA and the Geoweb utilize eXtensible Markup Language (XML) to create connections between services and provide descriptions about data, known as metadata. Software systems use metadata to configure information dynamically and maintain data integrity. There is a long list of XML specifications buttressing the Web.
Supported in numerous Web browsers and tools, JavaScript, a client-side Web scripting language developed by Netscape, is used to add interactive functions to HTML Web pages, which would otherwise be static.
Put together, JavaScript and XML, in their various forms, comprise the basis of Web 2.0. For example, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), is essentially the implementation of Web 2.0 on the client side, abetted by the JSON (JavaScript Objection Notation) data exchange format, which provides an alternative to XML.
“JSON is easier for developers than XML, and as a result you are seeing more and more JSON-based services appear,” said Frank. “The dirty little secret of AJAX is that there is more J than X in it,” he said, meaning more JavaScript than XML. Working in unison, these and other technologies will create more, better and faster connections between data sources, leading Web 2.0 to realize the promise of the Geoweb by bringing enhanced geospatial information to those who need it the most, when they need it the most.
Web 2.0 will usher in more information per screen by connecting servers in the background and merging relevant information from them into a single view. “Web 1.0 allows only a single server to send a bundle of information to a client. In order to access a second server with a second bundle of information on a second client, you have to open a separate network in a separate experience with the user seeing it as two different steps,” said Frank. “But when you think about the true value of a map, it comes from seeing multiple layers together superimposed on top of each other in a fusion of different data layers,” he said.
Frank delineated the three most important layers. “First, the backdrop, such as a raw floor plan; second, the assets, including the DoD’s blue force tracking GPS/GIS system; and third, all the textual data written about these places that can be read right on the map. This is what MetaCarta provides, but with Web 1.0, users look at each separately.”
To support the Geoweb on Web 2.0, MetaCarta recently released a JavaScript Developers Toolkit that enables the rapid development of Geoweb applications on MetaCarta’s flagship product, the Geographic Search and Referencing Platform (GSRP).
The company has released other new GeoWeb applications, such as a GeoSearch API, a GeoTagger API and support for Keyhole Markup Language (KML). Developed for use with Google Earth, KML is an XML-based language for expressing geographic annotation and visualization for Web-based, 2-D maps and 3-D browsers.
MetaCarta has contributed significantly to the growth of relevant geospatial information in its GSRP. Each successive version has provided a growing number of location references. For example, the latest version, GSRP 4.1, understands partial addresses from content in text and resolves it in latitude and longitude coordinates.
The MetaCarta intelligence search technology uses a naturallanguage process engine that extracts the most relevant information from the fire-hosed mass of unstructured data and generates a map layer which can appear inside any mapping tool, including Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth or ESRI’s ArcMap, used to build reports. The MetaCarta search process results in both maps simultaneously.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Meanwhile, ESRI filled in some gaps recently when the company released a specialized version of its bellwether ArcGIS desktop mapping platform geared for homeland security, emergency management and public safety organizations.
ESRI’s ArcGIS for Situational Awareness is a framework (comprising hardware, software and data) for geospatial intelligence and decision-making that provides real-time monitoring and updates of events, along with decision-support analysis. The technology bundle can merge disparate datasets, including GeoRSS feeds, live traffic camera and weather feeds into an analysis tool.
Based on RSS, Really Simple Syndication, an XML format used to describe feeds or channels of content, such as news articles or MP3 play lists, GeoRSS is an emerging standard that is designed to be consumed by geographic software such as map generators.
ArcGIS for Situational Awareness includes five features as well as implementation and training services. The Data Fusion and Analysis Appliance provides the foundation of data management, analysis, visualization and dissemination and is preconfigured with ArcGIS. The Data Appliance feature comes preloaded with terabytes of pre-rendered national and global imagery, street and transportation data, administrative boundaries and topographic maps.
Among the other three is the COP Viewer, a flexible, browserbased 2-D client providing a common operational picture that can be customized to enhance the level of situational awareness. The 3-D Desktop client allows client sharing and analysis of geographic information. Finally, the Data Management and Authoring client manages, authors and publishes data for use with included clients or any OGC-compliant client.
ESRI is also charged up about the Geoweb. “Web 2.0 is often associated with the Geoweb concept, in which participants everywhere on a host of platforms can use and contribute to the Geoweb,” said Bill Harp, ESRI defense and intelligence marketing manager.
Some ESRI products abet the growth of the Geoweb on Web 2.0, such as the ArcGIS JavaScript API, which provides the ability to build Web browser-based GIS applications, using ArcGIS Server services, to embed a map or query spatial data in a Web application. Using the ESRI JavaScript API, users can display interactive maps of their own data, search for features in GIS data and display the results as well as search for addresses and display the results. The API includes extensions for Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth that can be combined with ArcGIS server resources.
STANDARDS AND GOVERNANCE
Like MetaCarta, Fortius One is an InQTel portfolio company working to build out the Geoweb, in part for the DoD and IC. (Fortius and MetaCarta technologies are integrated.)
Fortius offers a user-friendly product called the GeoCommons for data collection and sharing in a common repository. “GeoCommons is a Geoweb platform that runs on a Web browser, so you don’t need any software installed on your computer to use it,” said Sean Gorman, Fortius chief executive officer.
The GeoCommons platform includes Finder, which allows nontechnical personnel to find and organize technical geospatial data, and Maker, which gives users the ability to create maps with a data set. The combination tool translates between different file formats such as Google Earth, KML and GeoRSS. “Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others provide base maps and we layer our data on top of that,” said Gorman.
Gorman believes the biggest challenge to the realization of the Geoweb is interconnecting all the data. “It’s all still very siloed in different pockets,” he said. “But it’s not only a technical challenge. It’s also an institutional and bureaucratic challenge. Part of it involves coming up with an agreed upon standard for federated search for geospatial data.”
NGA officials also point to standards and governance as the chief challenges to the growth of the Geoweb. “Existing OGC standards ease interoperability on the Web, but the governance of them is just beginning to evolve with the needed policies and frameworks that support service-sharing and reuse through instruments like service-level agreements between the provider and the consumer,” said Wever.
“For software developers, the implementation of governance within an SOA is about software orchestration and flow and which software has the right to access which information service at what time and what priority level. It comes down to how different services work together so they are used in accordance with SLAs,” said Schwarz.
From a human perspective, it makes sense that interest in maps would spur the Geoweb. “The reason maps are powerful is that people recognize their own worlds in a map. Through a map, the computer becomes more human and enters into a dialogue with the person. Maps are powerful already in telling stories in unclassified environments so you can imagine how powerful they are in classified environments,” said MetaCarta’s Frank. ♦