To improve the effectiveness of treaty inspections, the Department of Energy's Office of Non-Proliferation and National Security has tasked the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Remote Sensing Laboratory to cooperatively develop a portable customized Geographic Information System to support treaty inspections. The system, called Team Leader, uses an ArcView interface to integrate Global Positioning Systems, multi-media, and advanced communication technologies to provide remote users with on-line access to vital data needed during nuclear inspections. Team Leader provides the ability to access previous inspection data (e.g. maps, aerial photographs, reports, photographs, equipment information, and voice notes) for fast and efficient briefings prior to the inspection and for real-time data retrieval during the inspection. An inspector can use Team Leader to capture positional data, digital photographs, voice notes, equipment information, and text reports georegistered to the inspector's position or a selected feature in real-time during the inspection. Inspection teams can employ Team Leader to communicate with each other, display inspection team positions, automatically send new data, and transfer requested data between teams. Team Leader is implemented on two different hardware platforms, a suitcase unit using a laptop PC for on-site inspections and a personal unit using a belt-mounted PC with a miniaturized "heads-up" binocular display for in-facility inspections. Team Leader was created to support inspections, but it is also directly applicable a wide range of field-based data collection applications including environmental activities, surveillance activities, and utilities management.
The location of bridges is of great importance to military planners on both a strategic and tactical level. In addition, identification and maintenance of bridges is vital to our nation's infrastructure. Major bridges are essential to maintaining connectivity of a road transportation network. Given the importance of bridges, it is crucial to have both the locations and attributes of bridges in a GIS to facilitate military planning and operations. However, global digital data on bridges is either very sparse or non-existent. There are currently several digital cartographic data sets that contain bridge information. On a global scale, the 1:1 million scale Digital Chart of the World (DCW) contains road bridges as both point and line features. However, due to the small scale, only the most significant bridges are in the DCW. Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) also produces a 1:50000 scale product called Interim Terrain Data (ITD), which stores bridges as point and line features. However, ITD does not exist for much of the world. Thus, the issue is how to quickly build a GIS database over an area of interest that contains bridges. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) is working on this problem as part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency's (ARPA) sponsored Terrain Feature Generator program. The traditional approach is to manually digitize and attribute bridges from existing hard-copy maps or imagery. However, this is a time-consuming task. The option that TEC has pursued is to use a variety of digital cartographic sources to infer the locations of bridges. Using ArcInfo, TEC has combined the road network from DCW with a vector potential drainage network automatically extracted from a Digital Elevation Model (DEM). Using topology, provided by ArcInfo, together with terrain knowledge, TEC has written an AML to determine where drainage and roads cross. The nodes where these crossings occur are tagged as potential bridges. In addition, TEC has inferred potential bridge locations from combining: 1) roads extracted from scanned maps in a semi- automated procedure, and 2) the drainage network extracted from a DEM.
The U.S. Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) is currently in the process of revising and converting its World Vector Shoreline (WVS) digital database product. The revisions include the addition of bathymetry data, the generalization of the original 1:250,000 scale product into five additional smaller scale libraries, and the implementation of adaptive tiling, as well as other changes. The data conversion portion of this project consists of importing the existing WVS database into ArcInfo, and on completion of the revision process, exporting the six WVS libraries into DMA's Vector Product Format (VPF) according to the WVS product specification. This paper discusses the procedures developed by DMA for revising and converting WVS using ArcInfo.
The Hydrographic Source Assessment System (HYSAS) is a major spatial data initiative sponsored by the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA). The paper is an overview of HYSAS and its vision of a digital data warehouse for information to support the conventional nautical cartographer as well as the electronic chart maker. The Master Seafloor Digital Database (MSDDB) is the multi-layer result of this vision. The unique problems addressed are those encountered in the design of a very large spatial database of global extent serving a wide variety of users, and the further constraints of multi-level security and data privacy. Emphasis is placed on the commercially available software capability to produce, manage and display the MSDDB.