DoD News, Defense Media Activity
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24, 2014 – In a contribution to the Defense
Department’s fight against West Africa’s deadly Ebola virus disease outbreak,
the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has launched its first public
website of unclassified geospatial intelligence data.
NGA’s mission in support of national security is to visually
depict and assess situations on the ground using satellite imagery and other
geographically referenced information.
The public website, covering the West African countries
affected by the Ebola outbreak, is a new venture for the necessarily secretive
intelligence organization. Still, NGA has for years provided geographical
intelligence to first responders during most major natural disasters.
“My group regularly supports humanitarian assistance and
disaster relief efforts, as well as special security events that are driven by
the FBI,” Timothy J. Peplaw, director of the NGA Readiness, Response and
Recovery Office, told DoD News during a recent interview.
Supporting the Disaster Supporters
“NGA is not necessarily in the business of providing
unclassified data,” he added, “but my customer set is very open, so my group is
the one exception where we have to provide unclassified data and products to
people who support these disasters.”
The office always works through a lead federal agency,
Peplaw explained.
During wildfires, earthquakes or hurricanes, that agency is
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For the Ebola support, Peplaw’s
office works through the State Department. For special security events such as
the presidential address or the Super Bowl, it's the FBI or the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence.
“My group has in the past supported these events through
unclassified means,” he said, “but it's usually not through the World Wide Web
and unclassified. It's usually through things like data encryption or special
access with a need to know.”
Unclassified NGA Ebola Website
For the Ebola Support website, there is no NGA control,
Peplaw said, because his office wants its data and products to be available to
a variety of users, especially nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, who need
help in their work in West Africa -- organizations such as Doctors Without
Borders and the United Nations’ World Food Program.
But the general public can use it, nongovernmental
organizations can use it, and even foreign countries can use it, he said,
adding that some recent website statistics indicated that people from 77
foreign countries had accessed the site.
“We have a partnership with the State Department through the
World Wide Human Geography Data Working Group, formed in 2011 to focus on the
need for human geography global foundation data as a basis better understanding
cultures, activities and attitudes , Peplaw said. “Through that partnership, we
have access to a wide variety of unclassified publicly available data. So NGA
pulls that data together and offers it up as a service.”
Readiness, Response and Recovery
The Readiness, Response and Recovery Office provides data and
products and makes them available as a service using an online common operating
environment called ArcGIS from a California-based company called Esri. Products
include map atlases that Peplaw describes as maps and commercial imagery rolled
into one.
The service part, Peplaw added, includes atlas maps that
have different kinds of layers of data that users can turn on and turn off,
based on their needs.
“Let's say that I'm an NGO working with people who are out
at the Ebola treatment units, and we're trying to figure out how to get a
patient from a local hospital to one of these units,” he said. The NGO might
want to see transportation data, medical facilities, Ebola treatment units and
other data layers related to transporting that patient from a hospital to an
Ebola treatment unit, he explained.
Other Practical Uses of Geospatial Data
Another practical use of the website might be to determine
helicopter landing zones, Peplaw said.
“Let's say that we have to transport a critical patient via
helicopter to an Ebola treatment unit,” he said. “I can go in as a user and
turn on and off these different layers, so for a helicopter landing zone I'd be
interested in terrain [and] in critical infrastructure so I can see if there
are power lines in the area, and I can see if there are roads to get to that
helicopter landing zone.”
Latest and Greatest Data
The other service aspect of the website is that it’s live,
Peplaw said. “That means that as we, NGA, get different layers of data or
updates to that data, we update it in real time,” he explained. “Whenever
[users] access it, that's the latest and greatest data that's out there.”
NGA has an analyst in Monrovia deployed with the 101st
Airborne Division to support the Army, but the analyst also is helping the Liberian
government update the country’s essential maps through its Institute of
Statistics and Geoinformation Services. Other countries in the region, Peplaw
said, will be able to benefit from the public data available on the NGA Ebola
Support site.
The widespread nature of the Ebola outbreak has been a
technical and workforce challenge for the NGA office, he added.
“Usually when we support these kinds of things, it's in a
very concentrated area, and this is spread throughout several countries in
western Africa. The challenge is to provide geospatial intelligence support
over a huge swath of land,” Peplaw said.
NGA, WWW and the Future
The NGA office’s foray onto the World Wide Web will take the
agency in new directions in several ways moving forward.
“I think it means we spread ourselves globally,” Peplaw
said. “Our expertise is really in natural disasters and special security
events, but now all of a sudden we're involved in a health issue, so I think
[the direction] is only limited by the imagination.
“We can do so much with our data,” he continued, “and
pushing [it] out there as a service I think really gets it into a different
domain. … It's hard to say really where this is going to go in another five
years, but it certainly isn't going away.”
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment