got geoint?

We get excited when efforts we support garner press coverage. As such, the Empire Challenge, hosted by the U.S. Joint Forces Command and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, received nice coverage in CNET yesterday — and it highlighted some interesting realities about interoperability, comparing spy movies to what is reality.

For the average layman, people think of movies like the Bourne Ultimatum and Enemy of the State as how geospatial technologies really work. We have all seen the movie scene where a room full of intel analysts pull up real-time imagery and find a person or target within a matter of seconds. As this CNET article points out, it is much more difficult than it appears in the movies — isn’t it always that way?

As we all know, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has demonstrated a common interface for analysts to use sensors from different sources. Here’s quote from the OGC from the CNET article:

“Let’s say you’re an analyst, and you want (to find) out what’s going on in Bellingham, Wash., and you don’t know what sensors are available in Bellingham,” said Sam Bacharach of OGC. “Is there a Predator with an electrical-optical camera overhead? Maybe there are Washington State Patrol cameras on the interstates. Right now, just to know all those things exist, you have to go through an exhausting process to find them.”

They say that art imitates life. And, by trying to keep up with the movies isn’t “life imitating art”?

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Tags: Bourne Ultimatum, geospatial intelligence, NGA, Open Geospatial Consortium