Attention Guided Pattern and Geospatial Analysis System

With the large amount of geospatially-referenced material available, an important problem for NIMA is how to organize and present that information to their customers. We propose to address this problem by building a geospatial catalog system that will notjust tell you which products are available, but also allow the user to see the actual products and the relationship to other products. This will allow the NIMA customers to determine exactly which products contain the information they need and then orderthose products from NIMA. One of the key pieces of technology that we previously developed is a constraint-based reasoning system that ties the various types of information together. The key advance provided by this tool is the ability to provide acoordinated view of a wide variety of heterogeneous geospatial data. We propose to take this initial system and apply it directly to the problem of providing a universal graphic geospatial interface for all of NIMA's data sources.The technology describedin this proposal will form the basis of a new product for integrating geo-spatial information. This product will enable geospatial information to be flexibly integrated for application-domains (like those described this proposal) where multiple sourcesof information must be integrated with maps and/or satellite images. Potential customers, in addition to U.S. military and intelligence services, include insurance companies, environmental organizations, emergency response/aid organizations, newsorganizations, surveyors, mining and oil companies, timber harvesters, and even film companies (for location management). And, in addition to the commercial benefits from this product, the research will push forward the fundamental technology we aredeveloping for flexibly integrating heterogeneous geospatial information from multiple sources.