|
Track: Defense & Intelligence
Mike Hubbard
Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems
1210 Massillon Road
Akron, OH 44315
Telephone: 330-796-5789
Fax: 330-796-4050
E-mail: michael.hubbard@lmco.com
John Burky
Exporting ArcInfo Data to Support Interoperable Synthetic Environments
Data interchange among applications is a critical requirement for enabling distributed use of common data sets. Achieving lossless and complete data element interchange in support of the Modeling and Simulation (M&S) community has been a primary focus of the Synthetic Environment Data Representation and Interchange Specification (SEDRIS) program. As contract partners on the SEDRIS team, Lockheed Martin Tactical Defense Systems (LMTDS) and Esri have contributed toward the SEDRIS development and implementation of a mechanism for interchanging Synthetic Environment (SE) databases. This paper describes the Lockheed Martin approach for exporting SE databases, collected for the Special Operations Forces Aircrew Training System (SOF ATS) program and stored in ArcInfo, into the SEDRIS data model. The SOF ATS SE data contains two-dimensional real-world cultural information that is stored as attributed ArcInfo point, line, and area coverages. LMTDS established an intermediate data format, Topology Export Format
(TEF), to hold the ArcInfo coverage data and support the distributed access of this data by users with no ArcInfo licenses. In order to ensure no loss of data content, the TEF data maintains all of the topology contained in the original SOF ATS ArcInfo data. The SE data is moved from the original SOF ATS ArcInfo coverages to TEF through an export utility, written in ARC Macro Language (AML). The export utility uses an editable ASCII text file to determine the feature content and attribution of the source data set, enabling reuse of the TEF export utility for other, non-SOF ATS, ArcInfo data sets. To complete the SEDRIS access of ArcInfo data, LMTDS developed Read API software, in conformance with the SEDRIS data model, which accesses the TEF data through Level 0 Read API calls. The LMTDS process provides a mechanism for enabling SEDRIS access of ArcInfo coverages to support M&S requirements. The technique eliminates the need for the SEDRIS customer to have an ArcInfo license, and does not
require a topology rebuilding process.
|
|
