We're seeing more and more use of GML in the Defence market so we went to the DGI conference to check it out. The main thrust of the conference was GEOINT (Geospatial Intelligence) which is an all encompasing term for GIS, location data, interoperability and data exchange for intelligence purposes
The main conference sponsors DigitalGlobe and ESRI gave the key addresses
DigitalGlobe's Jill Smith provided an insight into the challenges of providing information (imagery) to answer the questions of what, where and when. Jill talked about how the general public (who are not GIS experts) make extensive use of Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth to visualise and share location data. Jill also discussed how Digital Globe were investing in new satellites to not only capture more intellegence (for example Stero Pair imagery for 3D visualisation) but also reduce costs. There were a few snippets relevant to Snowflake particularly around need for the OGC standards compliance in order to migrate location information into ?Service orientated? world!
Next up ESRI's John Day talked about ESRI's view of the enterprise
John pitched that GIS will change everything and in order to facilitate its widespread enterprise use, product functionality was moving off the desktop and into web services. He went on to say that the enterprise solution needs to be agile, where the stake holders at the CIO/IT level would be tasked to provide an infrastrcture to enable rapid proto-typing and large amounts of reuse, rather than monlithic, silo based systems
A few mentions of OGC and KML (don't forget KML is also an OGC standard) and an interesting piece regarding the large gap to bridge in order to migrate the functionality of desktop GIS client to the Enterprise - I'm sure ESRI are already onto that one!
Our overall impression from the conference was that the Defence Geo Intelligence sector is starting to look towards mainstream technologies such as Service Orientation Architectures, to create a 'backbone' to deliver both basic and complex clients which are reusable, flexible and yet easy to use. The conference was all about getting GEOINT used by a wider audience. To achieve this more and more GIS functionality will need to run as a service, presented with "big buttons" (for ease of use) at the front end.
With all this talk of Service Orientated Architectures, GML can only grow and grow. After all GML is only XML - and XML is the language of a SOA. It will be interesting to see who builds these GEOINT SOA's. We got the feeling that there's going to be a lot more System Integrators around especially if the GEOINT world is going to be SOA based, after all they've been building SOAs for years.
The trick for Snowflake is to get our technology in the hands of the SI's, after all we've got GML expertise and the location enabled web services technology. The beauty of SOA is that its all about decoupled services talking via XML. We're building SOA for National Mapping Agencies so why not for GEOINT - after all its just location data exchanged in XML.
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