The Infrastructure Applications Supporting the Integrated Natural Environment Authoritative Respresentation Program Process (INE ARP)

The Defense Modeling and Simulation Office (DMSO) has established the Integrated Natural Environment (INE) Program to provide the DoD Modeling and Simulation (M&S) community with ready access to authoritative representations of the natural environment. These environmental representations are to be developed from validated data and modeling resources, and delivered in a form readily understood by simulation users at the spatial and temporal resolution required for the study at hand. To accomplish this goal, the DMSO INE program is furthering the development of the Master Environmental Library (MEL) and Environmental Scenario Generator (ESG) through the implementation of a common geospatial information infrastructure.

The existing MEL represents an application and an underlying data resource network that facilitates data discovery at the metadata level and routine data access. The ESG application provides data mining capability on reference data sets (in order to locate significant environmental events) and a process-controller that orchestrates the production of integrated natural environment data bases utilizing the data resources available through MEL, as well as modeling facilities and other value-adding service providers. Under the INE vision, the portions of MEL and ESG that have to do with the fundamental issues of exchanging geospatial information will be formalized and implemented as a stand-alone infrastructure. The MEL then becomes a relatively simple application for querying, browsing, and ordering products via the infrastructure. The ESG will be a more advanced application focused on providing scenario composition, data mining, and scenario production capabilities to the M&S community by leveraging the services provided by the infrastructure. Notice that there is no longer a dependence of ESG on the MEL.

This presentation will provide an overview of the DMSO Integrated Natural Environment Authoritative Representation Process (INE ARP) and the key projects under the INE program. The emerging design of the INE infrastructure will be presented, with a clear indication of how the current MEL and ESG applications migrate to the use of the infrastructure. The multi-year development schedule for the infrastructure and applications will also be reviewed. Presentation 4.10, "Generating Physically Consistent, Integrated Environmental Databases from Distributed Data and Modeling Resources", will focus on the current scenario generation capability of the INE ARP. Presentation 4.22, "The Environmental Scenario Generator", will highlight the novel use of fuzzy logic and data mining of reference data sets to satisfy user requirements for the desired scenario.