‘Open Standards the Gateway to Interoperability?’

1. ‘Open Standards the Gateway to Interoperability?’ John Tate, Team SPARTA Geospatial Technical Lead (LMUK) 29th September 2010

2. Agenda • What is CGTS? • Why CGTS? • Open Standards Approach • The End Game • Benefits & Challenges

3. What is CGTS? • A 29-month UK MOD ‘demonstrator’ research project led by Team SPARTA: • Lockheed Martin UK IS&S (Lead) • Actica Consulting Ltd • Envitia Ltd • ESRI (UK) Ltd • Helyx SIS Ltd • With support and governance from MOD and Dstl. • The research seeks to deliver the technical evidence and conduct de-risking activity to support a future UK Defence Programme(s) to deliver: • Coherent and standardised services and tools. • Support for connected, disadvantaged and disconnected user. • The name is misleading – its not about a software tool kit – it is about the delivery of a common and coherent geospatial capability

4. Why CGTS? • Issues: • Mapping organisations create products not data. • Proprietary systems and data. • Piece meal procurement. • Multiple tools for the same task. • Lack of Combined/Joint Concepts and Doctrine and MOD ‘geo’ Vision

5. So What? System B • Islands of non-harmonised data • “Stove Pipes” or “Towers of Excellence” • In order to share: • Multiple exchanges required • Lack of integrated and interoperable systems • Leading to: • Multiple copies of the same data • Information and configuration management issues • Information incoherence • Increased training burden • Unable to support high tempo operations System A Air-gap only System C Re-format Format X Direct Transfer Format Y System E System D

6. CGTS Evidence • Not just a paper study assessments and demonstrations are important elements • Assessment: • Two weeks each for 7 GIS vendors • 2012/15 representative test rig including: standalone, LAN & WAN • 24 tests, 1,000+ iterations per vendor • Demonstrations: • Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration 2009 (Jun 10) • Geospatial Capability Demonstration (Feb 10) • Geospatial Capability Demonstration (Oct 10)

7. Open Web Services Approach C2 Situation Awareness Viewer Principle functions: Find & View Mobile, Disconnected & other LAN Users Sensor feeds and tracks 2D or 3D CONSUME ‘Rich Clients’ providing specialist or functional support. Principle functions to: create, analyse and share SEARCH Create Managed Data Web Services Managed Data Web Services Managed Data Web Services Catalogue Register Publish

8. Geospatial Capability – Services • Through detailed requirements capture identified the “services“ required to deliver the coherent geospatial capability. • Service groupings and descriptions coherent with MOD Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) initiative. • Terminology focussed at the non specialist. DISCOVER & RETRIEVE COLLECT & CREATE MANIPULATE & TRANSFORM VISUALISE ANALYSIS PRINT & EXPORT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

9. Open Standards • The reason open geospatial standards are important : • Bring more customer value through: • Reduce risk by increasing available options • Reduce dependency on a particular vendor • Ease integration with customers existing systems • Increase data availability and maintainability • Necessary component for the integration of large systems • Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Standards • Corner stone of many defence and non-defence programmes. • NATO Core GIS … • EU INSPIRE … • UK MOD’s Common Geospatial Tool Set … • UK British Transport Police, Metropolitan Police … • OGC becoming more evident in non-traditional GIS applications

10. UK Defence – SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE • BENEFITS • Coherent capability • Improved Shared Situational Awareness • Effective Decision Making • Improve Tempo of ‘operations’ • Improved collaboration and sharing of information Proposed SDI for UK Defence (developed by Dstl under GEAR – informed by CGTS)

11. OGC Standards are they sufficient? • Current OGC Standards could: • deliver against ~75% of geospatial capability needs with profiling activity • ignoring data management & print capabilities this rises to ~93% • Deltas exist and grouped as follows: • Profiling activity e.g. WMS as well as WPS profile for line of sight etc • Current OGC standard development e.g. WCPS for re-sampling • No standard exists or is in development e.g. printing / plotting services • Services that are outside OGC e.g. export services • Web services also evaluated as a viable data access mechanism

12. Service Implementations • Evaluated OGC services provided by GIS multiple GIS vendors across multiple infrastructures in both test and demonstration environments. • Web services proved to be viable but a range of implementations are required – one size does not fit all. • Need to balance: • Performance v flexibility v number of anticipated users • Single CRS but multiple services v multiple CRS and single service • Single layer but many services v Many layers and single service • But … • what needs to be common and open is the service and profile used to deliver the implementation

13. OGC Profiles • Evidence indicates vendor OGC implementations differ . • Barrier to interoperability • Profiles needed to ensure that standards delivered in ‘standardised’ manner. • Profiles valid for both consumers and publishers • Test scripts needed to ensure compliance • Need to be focussed on the ‘warfighter’ not just data producers • Further staffing of profiles currently on going for WMS, WFS and WCS Web Map Context/ KML Styled Level Descriptor Web Map Service Geographic Mark-up Language Web Coverage Service Web Feature Service Web Processing Service Profile Priority: 1 2 3 Test Script

14. OGC Standards – Issues and Needs • Security remains a potential issue • Standards don’t support the need to tell the ‘service’ who is making the request but … • GeoXACML offers an approach for fine grained access control • Configuration management of standards • To manage changes and updates to current and future standards • Governance / mandating by a body with appropriate authority • To ensure that the standards are adopted by projects • Need for a persistent test bed • To test consumers and publishers to ensure they conform to the standards and profiles • MOD need to increase their OGC influence • We will present our findings to the OGC Technical Committee (TC) at the December 2010 TC (Sydney, Australia)

15. The End Game Find Bind Bind Publish

16. OGC Standards supporting interoperability • Build on existing capabilities • Enhance and enable rather than replace – in many cases most of the key components already exist • Standards are essential but not sufficient … • Need to ‘profile’ – the ‘route card’ through the standard • Need to test compliance against the standard and the profile • Need to mandate and govern usage – both publishers and consumers • ‘Tailored’ Geo capability dictated by user needs – not everyone needs a “GIS”. • Services support ‘controlled’ and ‘managed’ access to data. • Able to tailor the ‘view’ to meet the users needs.

17. Interoperability: Via open web services Increased operational effectiveness: Sharing of data, removal of data silos Improved Shared Situational Awareness & Understanding: Consistency of viewed data across a range of platforms/applications Integration of: Multiple data sources, Multiple applications (& vendors) Multiple network bandwidths Support to disadvantaged/ mobile users. An End-To-End Demonstration. Governance and Leadership Vision and Ownership Policy Not just geospatial Implementation (including standards) Testing and accreditation Services Management and Ownership Interoperability National and International Education and Training Information Management People and procedures Infrastructure Registry / Catalogue Enterprise Service Bus Benefits and Challenges Challenges Benefits

18. Questions John Tate Team SPARTA Geospatial Technical Lead (LMUK) John.tate@lmco.com +44 1252 732500