—Jose Diaz-Marin, PBS&J
The Belvoir New Vision Planners (BNVP) is providing master planning, conceptual design and program integration, management, and oversight services under the directive of a Department of Defense Base Realignment and Closure (DoD BRAC) decision. This decision involves the relocation of an estimated 22,000 personnel (approximately 6,000 military personnel and 16,000 civilian employees and contract personnel) to the Fort Belvoir Army installation. The project includes the development of the plans and vision to construct a seven (7) million square foot space, transportation systems, and supporting infrastructure to accommodate this transformation. In order to assist the management of such a complex program, a 3D/4D Web Mapping Portal was developed. This portal is a cross-platform, cross-browser web application used to visualize spatial data from multiple sources in a web-based easy-tonavigate 3D environment. The portal overlays multiple datasets and visualizes temporal spatial data, as well as provides the user with tools to create map markups, export workspace to Google Earth desktop, perform geocoding, object and area selections, and conduct geospatial analysis with Esri's ArcGIS Server as the back-end GIS engine. The portal may be dynamically configured to include data layers from ArcGIS Server map services, as well as from a variety of KML-enabled public and custom web services. The front-end (UI) component of the portal is based on Ext JS AJAX framework and provides users with smooth desktop- like 3D navigation experience in a web browser. A Google Earth plugin API is used to host the 3D environment displayed within the web browser. Server-side custom data processing is implemented via geospatial web services that provide a gateway to ArcGIS Server geoprocessing capabilities, enabling a large number of users to perform complex analysis without acquiring per-user desktop GIS software.