A New Paradigm for Assessing Environmental Data Generation and Management

摘要

Historically, the challenge for simulation developers in generating environmental data was creating a virtual world rich enough to engage the using audience. Data was hard to find, causing developers to create data that was realistic looking, but not necessarily accurate. This limited the simulation community's ability to interoperate with other systems in the infosphere (e.g. C2 systems, Intelligence Systems). Those historical limitations are long gone and there is a seemingly insatiable demand for accurate and interoperable information systems, including high resolution simulation. Meeting these demands will require new ways to think about the generation, management, and distribution of environmental data. This paper proposes a new paradigm for organizing the discourse about environmental data generation and management. Thanks to geospatial community efforts, we now have maturing geospatial data standards that can be leveraged to improve interoperability among simulations and between simulations and other information systems. Cloud technologies enable transmission of standards-based data, allowing streamlined communications of increasing amounts of high-resolution, geospatial data. In this paper, we lay out a strategy for simulation professionals to use these modern standards and cloud technologies to obtain and share the high-resolution, accurate data they require. We will introduce am framework of metrics for assessing the efficacy of environmental data generation and some observations made in a small initial discovery experiment. Finally, we will lay out the next steps towards achieving the vision of broad infosphere community interoperability through streamlined, point-of-need environmental data services.