—Chetan Desai, ProLogic, Inc.
Warfighters must be able to easily access, combine, and manipulate (display, filter, aggregate, analyze) multiple sources of Electronic Warfare (EW) Intelligence data without direct support from data production centers. An ideal answer is a Net-Centric User Defined Operational Picture (UDOP) system, which can automatically pull specific data directly from authoritative webenabled sources to support distributed analysis and collaboration. For UDOP to work, participating data sources must be net-centric with machine-to-machine (M2M) data accessibility, visibility, and understanding. A UDOP system is able to create, visualize, and share decision-focused views of the operational environment by organizing disparate intelligence data sources to support accurate situation awareness and timely decisionmaking in a distributed collaborative net-centric environment. Traditional point-to-point architectures limit the connectivity to be only between pre-coordinated systems. Data sources that are net-centric support cross stove-pipe consumption by an "unanticipated consumer" such as a UDOP system. The USAF ESC Global Awareness Presentation Services (GAPS) project has implemented an advanced UDOP system for USSTRATCOM, which uses a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to take full advantage of web-enabled data sources. The GAPS system provides visually-fused Global Shared Situational Awareness services supporting agile net-centric operations on NIPRNET, SIPRNET and JWICS. A key element of the GAPS system is the concept of a UDOP template, which is used to define key elements for creating the 'picture', including the varied data sources, spatial and temporal selection and filtering, attribute filters, and symbology. Each 'layer' of the UDOP specifies a data source, filters, and symbology. The UDOP template does not contain any retrieved data, but when the template is executed by a UDOP application, data is retrieved from the web-enabled sources, filtered, and converted into visual representations. The GAPS system consumes these web-enabled data sources, allowing end-users anywhere on the GIG (at a strategic or tactical level) to process, exploit and combine the data into fused, shareable UDOPs that can be disseminated through the GAPS repository to support collaboration and decision making. This enables analysts to focus on Intelligence rather than data processing and management. GAPS architecture uses CJMTK's ArcGIS Server and ArcGIS Explorer to implement the UDOP authoring and viewer tools.