Getting "geo prepared" is all about carving out standards.

Geospatial preparedness in the war on terrorism follows from a basic fact of life in post-9/11 America. "We don't know where the next terrorist event is going to be," said Susan Kalweit, who leads the federal Interagency Geospatial Preparedness Team.

Essentially, this means that emergency response managers have to be ready everywhere. "It is critical to have a capability that spans our entire nation that is consistent," Kalweit noted during an address earlier this year. "Who would have expected Oklahoma City? Did anyone anticipate SARS? The bottom line is, the basic capabilities associated with geospatial need to exist everywhere."

Kalweit was tasked to the Homeland Security department from Defense's National Imagery and Mapping Agency to help develop a framework for the national geospatial strategy.

What we call geospatial technology today is in part defined by the mission we want it to serve, Kalweit said. "It happens that the convergence of the technologies in the geospatial information realm is very timely. It is the convergence of GIS, GPS, remote sensing technologies, mapping, and other capabilities."

The ultimate goal is to create what Kalweit calls "location-based services."

"And when you're talking about emergency management you are talking about location," she said. "Where is the incident? Where are the assets I need to bring together? How do I get them there? How do I get people who have been affected out of harm's way? And what kind of time frame do we have? It is very similar to what the military deals with as they are planning operations."

The national strategy for geospatial preparedness envisions precisely such uses, where vital geographic data is available across a range of mainstream systems. Plus, Kalweit said, geospatial disciplines are now converging with newly emerging technologies like "WiFi and grid computing, allowing this kind of data to be on your PDA. Web services and open systems computing allow you to bring in different kinds of services to apply to specific missions, creating a tremendous opportunity to save lives and protect property."

The DHS geospatial strategy is pursuing creation of "a common spatial reference system that uses open standards" which Kalweit said "will ultimately get us to national interoperability and cost savings." The idea is to create a "buy once, use many, and re-use again and again world"-for geospatial data or services.

"Run the other way."

The interoperability issues geospatial technologists and leaders face would surprise no one in any other homeland security discipline. The horizon is defined by stove-pipes. Kalweit recalled a drill in which a federal system was employed to make test use of a local fire department's digital mapping assets. When the two systems were put together, the firehouse itself showed up, digitally, sitting in the middle of the Potomac River, she recalled.

Today, geospatial leaders are looking to create a single strategy that encompasses a range of assets that merely include the U.S. Geological Survey's national map, FEMA's flood plain mapping systems, the Interior department's GeoSpatial One-Stop program, and other assets managed by NIMA, the Census Bureau, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Corps of Engineers, plus state and local systems, Kalweit said.

The wealth of geospatial data already collected and for which applications exist give emergency managers remarkable abilities when co-located with other data-driven assets. Kalweit noted that evacuations can be planned today that automatically call the phone numbers of people living in a specific grid related to a disaster site and inform them which way to run. "The same system can call the people on the other side of the event and tell them to run the other way."

It is the "assured availability of data" that planners believe is a key element of their strategy. "National geospatial preparedness is about assuring quality data, and assuring that it's available," Kalweit said.

Bill Jeffrey, a DHS senior director of R&D, noted earlier this year that there are 87,000 different state and local governments in the U.S. As standards are developed the "economic advantages of certain technologies" will be closely observed, he said. "The most likely technologies and products to be adopted will be those that will enhance security while simultaneously making the business more efficient and more productive," he said.

Geospatial systems that serve functions across thousands of entities will likely be highly sought, and geospatial systems were cited by DHS CIO Steve Cooper as among the half-dozen or so critical technologies the department is pursuing.

"I call geospatial IT a glue technology,'" Kalweit said. "That is, more than 80 percent of all government databases contain some kind of spatial data. Whether it's an address, a city name, whatever--there are many versions of spatial data which makes it a great connector across disparate databases."

Such databases can aid emergency managers but also can help with charting demographic trends and growth rates, predicting infrastructure needs, or aid in transportation planning, she noted. As a framework for the strategy is developed, and industry brings emerging technologies to the forefront, look for new simulation and modeling systems to be developed to give planners in all areas a broader grasp on how to link their missions to the right places at the right time, Kalweit said.

"Ultimately, geospatial technology is about modeling the world," she said.

For more information about geospatial technology, visit the Spatial Technologies Industry Association site at www.spatialtech.org.

Article by PSI Senior Editor Robert Green. Green has covered government for more than 15 years and has been focusing on security issues since 1998. You can reach him at robertgreen@pubsector.net.

Photo Courtesy of NASA