Best Practices for Mission Applications

Gathering Geospatial Data in a Contingent Environment

—Patrice Moore, Justin Daniel, and James Mooney, Spatial Engineering, Inc.

In October 2009, US Army Central (USARCENT) requested that 46 sites throughout the AOR be extracted from satellite imagery and field verified. Verification would include GPS location, photographs of real property, and updating attributes for over 30 feature classes. Field data was to be uploaded within 24 hours and displayed within 72 hours. Once the day's survey was complete the data processing team went to work on standardizing the collected attributes to SDSFIE compliance, correcting geometry, and re-classing extracted features into the correct feature class per survey comments and feedback from our military client. The goal was to prepare this data for display on USARCENT's geospatial viewer, the Infrastructure Spatial Intelligence Portal (ISIP) giving the war fighter the most accurate, up to date facility information. Lessons learned from this endeavor include successful methods of data transfer and communication, increasing timely feedback to the survey team regarding the information collected, streamlining collection and data processing workflows.