GDI APAC: Geospatial Defence & Intelligence

Lessons Learnt for Military Intelligence

Geographic and spatial information have always provided the edge to militaries for enhanced situational awareness and c4i, be it on urban, jungle or any other challenging terrain. Whilst Asian militaries are on one hand moving towards building up their own NSDIs, their Information and Command Centers’ increasingly require better geospatial intelligence.

After three months of research with senior stakeholders in this sector, the three driving points of this market seems to be:

• Need for high quality and detailed data and images
• Filtering the information to operational intelligence
• Increase inter governmental data sharing and data interoperability

As Adam Baddeley from Asian Military Review stated, ‘GIS is not just a map, but an essential core architecture for the attainment of the overall… intelligence picture which fuses human, imagery measurement and signature intelligence sources’. This scope of GIS ties in with the driving forces of an emerging and spending Asia Pacific market.

Case studies of Brunei’s JOCS (Joint Operations Command and Control) programme, Malaysia’s C2 architecture and the advanced SDIs built by Bakosurtanal, Indonesia and the Survey of India have proved that militaries and governments in this part of the world are now actively developing the use of geospatial technology for defence and security applications.

From 27 – 30 September 2011, Geospatial Defence & Intelligence Asia Pacific will host Asia’s thought leaders of security and operational excellence in the geospatial sector in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Join us on this forum to engage in a key industry dialogue that goes beyond coffee table discussions.

• 30+ technical sessions from Military, Government and Industry
• Real-life operational case studies
• 100+ attendees
• 3 Tailored workshops
• 17 countries represented
• 32 hours of networking
• NEW! Sessions from India, Vietnam, Pakistan and United States
• 1 unique Asia Pacific event

Technologies highlighted at GDI APAC 2011 include:

John Teufert from NATO’s Consultation, Command and Control Agency will be presenting a network-centric approach utilising state-of-the-art GIS technology and open standards. He will look at the Recognised Environmental Picture (REP) architecture that was tested during the NATO Coalition Warrior Interoperability Demonstration (CWID) and other operational examples from NATO missions that apply to both the data exchange and data sharing protocols and data formats.

Subba Swarna Rao from Survey of India will be highlighting the National Spatial Data Infrastructure which is an initiative by the Government of India to encapsulate various types and formats of geospatial data from a number of government and non-government organisations onto one platform for use by the citizens. He will also touch upon the challenges of survey techniques and methods for a large country with landmass like India and will refer to the acquisition of geo intelligence from such surveys.

Dr. William Cartwright from International Cartographic Association will be speaking on a novel way of obtaining geospatial Intelligence Using Web 2.0 using mixed media, i.e. video, online server, imaged etc for GEOINT collection. He will also touch upon the Geoexploration that he has worked and conceptualised – the underlying concept behind which is to 'browse’ the interface to ‘see’ the types of elements.