U.S. Navy to require “open GIS”

U.S. Navy to Require “Open GIS”

March 7th, 2008 · 14 Comments · ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, ESRI, Open Source

A reader forwarded me this article from Federal Computer Week about the Navy looking at only accepting “systems based on open technologies and standards”.

Vice Adm. Mark Edwards, deputy chief of naval operations for communications, broke the news March 5 to a Navy IT Day audience in Vienna, Va., sponsored by AFCEA International. “The days of proprietary technology must come to an end,” he said. “We will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data.”

By using an open network architecture, the Navy could rapidly upgrade its capabilities and handle increases for demand, Edwards said. “Above all, we must break the stovepipes of data so that we can share information across domains,” he said.

Now he is talking in general (no pun intended) here, but the point is clear. If you want to do business with the Navy, including GIS, you’ll need to support open standards. I’m guessing this means using WMS with your ArcIMS and ArcGIS Server implementations and not using Personal Geodatabases anymore. I’m pretty sure loading the data into SQL Server 2008 Spatial and then connecting to it from ArcMap is acceptable, but we are going to start having to change the way we implement GIS for our Navy clients.

Should be interesting to see how quickly this gets implemented.

Navy personnel excited about leaving “stovepipe GIS”

Tags: Programming

14 responses so far ↓

1 Anon // Mar 7, 2008 at 11:01 am

Ah so they want to bail on ESRI and move to open source. Kudos for the Navy.
2 James Fee // Mar 7, 2008 at 11:04 am

Open standards is much different from open source. This won’t mean much to Microsoft, Oracle, ESRI, etc as they all support “open standards”. Just means that you’ll be able to interop easier than you did before.

Of course open source will be easier to implement, but I just don’t see that happening at least in the areas I’m involved in. The Navy/Marines and ESRI will continue to have a huge relationship.
3 Lefty // Mar 7, 2008 at 11:26 am

So what does this mean for ESRI James?
4 James Fee // Mar 7, 2008 at 11:28 am

Not much, their software already “supports” OGC and if there are other “standards” that the Navy wants supports, they’ll just add them.

We’ll continue to deploy ArcGIS Server, ArcSDE and ArcGIS Desktop. They’ll just connect to open data sources rather than things such as the File Geodatabase.

Using open standards in GIS is good for everyone including ESRI and their users.
5 JOD // Mar 7, 2008 at 11:52 am

This announcement will have little if any effect in the next 3 years. The guys in the field will always do what works best. There is no bandwidth, the systems are old, the officers rarely understand the technology, and there is so much legacy software that people are going to stick with because they are comfortable with it. ArcGIS is just one piece of geospatial software that the Navy and Marines use. Remote View, Socket GXP, IMAGINE, Falcon View, C2PC…all of these would have to support open standards fully before any radical changes are made.

NGA was yacking about open standards a year or so ago, and what did they do - launch their own Google Earth fusion server before KML was adopted by the OGC. Why did they do this? People needed something that worked.
6 James Fee // Mar 7, 2008 at 11:56 am

Well that is very true.
It is one thing for a Vice Adm. to say these things, but another for it to actually impact new contracts.

I mean factor in NMCI and then you know you’ve got a ton of work ahead for certifying new applications that meet the standards.
7 Bill // Mar 7, 2008 at 2:18 pm

I don’t think you’ll see a bunch of new technologies. The current technology set (ESRI) meets the “open standards” requirement if you take the time to configure it that way.

I am not looking for this proclamation to have any effect on my Navy work for the foreseeable future.
8 Bruce // Mar 7, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Bill
“take the time” is the problem with ESRI. They really make you go out of your way to do this. They didn’t enable WMS without a separate download until 9.0 (.1 ?) and when they updated ArcExplorer to 9.0 a few years ago they didn’t include WMS support for almost 9 months. I still feel ArcMap struggles with a WMS image as opposed to an ArcIMS image. Making ArcIMS serve as a WMS is a royal pain.
Bruce
9 Tim Maddle // Mar 7, 2008 at 7:11 pm

While it’s true nothing will change overnight, reading the excepts above and the full article, I can’t help but feel that the Admiral’s statements indicate the Navy is looking to replace some of its current technologies with lower-cost or Open Source alternatives.

The Navy’s decision was informed by a combination of motivations, including the desire to provide the latest capabilities to warfighters and control the costs of its information technology operations (emphasis mine), he added.

“We can’t accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities,” Edwards said.

While it’s true that ESRI’s products can serve data in open formats such as WMS, moving to those formats opens the playing field to a much wider variety of products.
10 James Fee // Mar 7, 2008 at 8:15 pm

Tim: That may be true but I can’t see any scenario where ESRI is replaced by the Navy or Marine Corps. What this does though is allow ALL the applications and servers the Navy/Marine Corps uses to interop with each other. That is more what this addresses here.
11 Bill // Mar 7, 2008 at 9:51 pm

@Bruce

I agree that it’s not an easy thing to do but I also agree with James’ last comment that this speaks more to interop.

I find it interesting that this came from the deputy CNO for communications. I just wouldn’t read this as any major shift by the Navy toward open-source.
12 Tim Maddle // Mar 8, 2008 at 8:42 am

First thing: I didn’t say or mean to imply that the Navy was going to just dump all their ESRI software and turn to alternatives. However, when you talk about an “Open Network Architecture”, “Open Standards”, and a desire to cut costs (quote below), I have to interpret that as a desire to break with some of the traditional technologies and incorporate newer ones.

“We can’t accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities,” Edwards said. “In the civilian marketplace, it’s just the opposite. Some private-sector concerns are cutting their costs by 90 percent while expanding their performance.”

We will all interpret that differently, but one thing it clearly indicates is a tremendously strong focus on cutting costs. Of course, interoperability and eliminating stovepipes (which often mean that redundant data is being stored and served) is part of cutting costs. However, I can’t believe that the Admiral’s statements don’t also indicate a belief that there are products out that perform better at a much lower cost than what the Navy is using now.

Again, I’m not saying the Navy is going to replace all of it’s ESRI products tomorrow. In the end, no one knows to what degree, or what pace, they will incorporate Open Source or lower-cost alternatives. However, the Admiral’s statements, along with the increasing viability of Open Source tools (USGS, for example, has an aerial imagery WMS feed that (I think) is MapServer based) indicate to me that he is looking to replace some expensive pieces of the puzzle with less expensive pieces.
13 JOD // Mar 8, 2008 at 1:16 pm

Folks still need to understand that ArcGIS is still only one of the geospatial software packages out there, and when you move down to trigger puller level its not even in use (too cumbersome when there are no GIS specialists available). Discussions of things like WMS and MapServer are irrelevant until the new joint communications architecture comes online (2020?). When you think of deployed units think of the equivalent of a dial-up modem. What also makes the Navy polices somewhat irrelevant is that CENTCOM is fighting all of the wars right now, thus it’s the policies of the combatant commands that will realy dictate where things head.
14 bender // Mar 9, 2008 at 3:51 am

There is no OGC standard that will last for the next 5 years. I don’t see any future technology coming up from this organization. Most of it is not even useful in real world. WMS and CSW is popular, OK, but in mapping technology KML is more popular. WFS isn’t feasible for anything but your own project. GML is a mindbloat from the naughty professor. WCS is useless crap. Geoprocessing service spec is note even standardizes and will be not usable in practice. Open standards means SOAP services. Now and in the future, Amen.