Home > News & Events > MITRE Publications > The Edge >

Imagine being able to follow-in real time-the progress of a live Global Hawk or Predator unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or any other manned or unmanned tactical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform, all from within your Web browser. Link that up with user subscription services like those being developed by the Air Force Joint Battlespace Infosphere (JBI) and the Department of Defense (DOD) Web portal development efforts and what do you get? The next generation of DOD Web services.

MITRE’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Information Service (ISRIS) research project is experimenting with the latest commercial Web technology to make the real-time services and unprocessed sensor data from today’s operational and developing ISR platforms available to the DOD community with no client-side requirements other than a commercial Web browser. We chose Global Hawk as the proof-of-concept platform because of its open ground station architecture, standard data formats, and multiple sensor data types: electro-optic, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, and ground moving target indicator.

MITRE has developed and demonstrated an ISRIS prototype server for the Global Hawk. With it, users can access past, future, and current mission, navigation, and collection plans in a dynamically generated report or in an interactive map display. They can also review sensor data for quality and utility before using time and bandwidth to retrieve the raw data. Collected primary imagery is converted into a browser-compatible format that displays an image thumbnail and a list of National Imagery Transmission Format Standard header information. Real-time situational awareness information allows users to monitor an ongoing mission. The map display provides situational awareness information, including current UAV position, flight path, waypoints, and collection targets. Each data point on the map can be queried for detailed textual information. A geospatial search capability is also provided that enables users to search for collection targets and completed imagery within an area of interest. The prototype uses the XML (eXtensible Markup Language) capabilities of the ISRIS commercial off-the-shelf software to enable data export to external systems and applications such as common operational picture displays and collection/ sensor/mission management tools.

MITRE is currently developing a proof-of-concept ISRIS Web service for the Predator. The Predator platform introduces the challenge of providing Web browser access to real-time video clips and ephemeris data. The interactive map display provides situational awareness information, including current UAV and sensor target position, flight track, and sensor track. We are also investigating low-bandwidth Web-based video stream/clip display solutions. Who would be interested in such a capability? How about a cross-service Time Critical Targeting cell collaborating to strike mobile targets using the real-time sensor data and dynamic sensor retasking capabilities of both Global Hawk and Predator UAVs? How about an exploitation center that identifies a suspicious object on a wide-area-search image and needs the current UAV locations in order to determine the quickest means to initiate a high-resolution image retasking request? Or how about a Joint Task Force Commander, who wants to check on the progress of the current theater UAV missions without interrupting the operational staff?

All levels of the Department of Defense, from the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence to the individual armed services, have issued calls for Web enablement and levied requirements and mandates to bring more content and capability to the battlespace internets. The ISRIS project is pushing leading-edge Internet technology to the ISR ground station and, in doing so, is opening up a new level of information accessibility and Web services to the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance community. The introduction of these raw data sources, some with real-time feeds, will change the static product paradigm of today’s battlespace internets and require a distributed Web service computing architecture in which to operate effectively.

While this architecture does not exist today on our operational networks, the MITRE Technology Program, in concert with the DOD, is working on the new technology, processes, and models necessary to make it a reality. MITRE’s Air Force-sponsored Next Generation JBI Core Services research project is developing the distributed architecture for publishing, subscribing, transforming, and personalizing information objects. This publish-and-subscribe model will define the broker service between the data producers, such as ISRIS, and the consumers, who could be end users, applications, or systems. MITRE’s Distributed Metadata Services, or DiMeS, project, is developing the profiling language for the JBI that will be used by both service providers and consumers to match users with data, and data with users. The ISRIS project is collaborating with both efforts to produce the next generation of distributed Web services for the DOD.

---

For more information, please contact John Kane using the employee directory.

---