Simulation Over Geographic Information System (SOGIS) Web Service

Building on over two years of success in adapting geographic information system (GIS), simulation, and Web service technologies to support the planning needs of government agency coalitions, the Multi Agency Planning (MAP) MITRE Sponsored Research (MSR) team is working to integrate these technologies into a seamless Web service portal. Our approach is to use a GIS Web service as a display interface for both simulation results and operator status report information. We integrate a GIS Web service display into an exercise control pane, and feed custom GIS display layers with data from a metadata repository, which in turn is frequently updated by either simulation results or field status reports. The field status reports come from participants logged into a Web reporting service, and we anticipate the use of real-time sensor, global positioning system (GPS), and/or transponder based status data streams as automated sources of updates. The simulation updates come through a Web service developed in another MITRE research effort, called SimServer. We use existing simulations to produce an event and movement log that SimServer plays over the Internet to the MAP Workbench Metadata Server. We leverage the ESRI Tracking Server utility to provide GIS update data streams from the metadata repository as a Web service to thin SOGIS clients. We provide SOGIS client as a pane of the MAP Workbench but it can also be accessed directly. We hope to further evolve this capability in future research to support simulation interaction and composition via the GIS interface, and eventually to provide a simple simulation engine as a web service.