NCOIC Plenary Highlights Collaboration and Interoperability

Last week in Brussels, Belgium, the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium highlighted it's support of collaboration and interoperability through an information exchange session with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and an impressive lab interoperability demonstration .

As published in Defense News, the "lab interoperability framework" demonstration was designed to show how different players could share an operational picture of an area. The NCOIC pointed to the recent Haiti operation or the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as examples where different networks or countries could communicate using these standards. Customers could be NATO, the European Union, civilians, governments or industry. The standards will be published free of charge for public use later this year after the NCOIC gives final approval. The NCOIC says that using its lab interoperability framework can save companies approximately $200,000 per event in labor costs, shorten execution timelines by 66 percent and reduce the risk of event failure.  

In an effort to engage and collaborate with industry, the NGA briefed attendees on the Geospatial Community Cloud Project. While this effort is not an acquisition, it is intended to be an opportunity to discuss the status of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) sharing across the community and to explore the application of cloud computing to this important requirement.  For next steps, the agency charged NCOIC members to provide a plan of actions and milestones for possible inclusion of NGA systems on the NCOIC lab interoperability test bed. Recommendation are scheduled to be presented at the next NCOIC plenary, September 10, 2010 in Falls Church, Virginia. The entire NGA brief is provided below.

Sharing Geospatial Intelligence and Services

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