Web Services are becoming the standard technology used to share data for many Navy and other DoD operations. Since Web Services technologies provide for discoverable, self-describing services that conform to common standards, this paradigm holds the promise of an automated capability to obtain and integrate data. However, automated integration of applications to access and retrieve data from heterogeneous sources in a distributed system such as the Internet poses many difficulties. Assimilation of data from Web-based sources means that differences in schema and terminology
prevent simple querying and retrieval of data. Thus, machine understanding of the Web Services interface is necessary
for automated selection and invocation of the correct service. Service availability is also an issue that needs to be
resolved. There have been many advances on ontologies to help resolve these difficulties to support the goal of sharing
knowledge for various domains of interest.
In this paper we examine the use of case-based classification as an alternative/supplement to using ontologies for
resolving several questions related to knowledge sharing. While ontologies encompass a formal definition of a domain of
interest, case-based reasoning is a problem solving methodology that retrieves and reuses decisions from stored cases to
solve new problems, and case-based classification involves applying this methodology to classification tasks. Our
approach generalizes well in sparse data, which characterizes our Web Services application. We present our study as it
relates to our work on development of the Advanced MetOc Broker, whose objective is the automated application
integration of meteorological and oceanographic (MetOc) Web Services.
KEYWORDS: Databases, Geographic information systems, Java, Analytical research, Personal digital assistants, Data acquisition, Roads, Internet, Mining, Homeland security
The Naval Research Laboratory’s Geospatial Information Database (GIDBTM) Portal System has been extended to now include an extensive geospatial search functionality. The GIDB Portal System interconnects over 600 distributed geospatial data sources via the Internet with a thick client, thin client and a PDA client. As the GIDB Portal System has rapidly grown over the last two years (adding hundreds of geospatial sources), the obvious requirement has arisen to more effectively mine the interconnected sources in near real-time. How the GIDB Search addresses this issue is the prime focus of this paper.
The National Guard Bureau (NGB) and the Naval Research Lab (NRL) have developed a Digital Mapping System (DMS) Portal System that currently connects over 360 geospatial data servers. The DMS Portal System is located at http://ngbcdmaps.gtri.gatech.edu and is being used by nationwide law enforcement (approximately 5000 users/month) to generate geospatial mapping solutions to satisfy broad requirements with no licensing required. This paper will highlight the current functionality of the DMS Portal System to allow many types of geospatial information (such as weather, conventional maps, imagery, plume model dispersions, etc.) to appear in a common environment regardless of how the information is originally stored. The DMS Portal System has substantial potential usage in the homeland defense arena as well as with conventional DoD/government and private sector users. Future directions for this cutting-edge technology will be outlined.
The Naval Research Laboratory's Digital Mapping, Charting and Geodesy Analysis Program is investigating the application of wavelet technology to terrain approximation in 3D mapping. The wavelet transform allows us to obtain the frequency content of gridded elevation data while retraining the spatial context. We use a 2D discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to reduce Digital Terrain Elevation Data to low and high frequency components. The low frequency components represent widespread fluctuations in terrain and over large areas give a very close approximation to the original data set. Each application of a wavelet transform gives us a 75% reduction in the amount of data that must be displayed. A level 2, 2D DWT allows us to represent large amounts of terrain data with only 6.25% of the original data. A reverse transform on the reduced data set makes possible the restoration of any level up to the original data with only minor loss, making the application suitable for multi-resolution systems. This application is also ideal for time-critical applications. Processing 1,073,179 DTED elevations down to 67,304 takes approximately one-half second. Optimized triangulated irregular network algorithms are reported to require over 45 seconds for a similar sized data set. We describe the application of wavelet technology to Internet-based 3D mapping. In addition to custom 2D maps that may consist of vector, raster and gridded data, users may generate 3D maps by area-of-interest.
The Naval Research Laboratory's Digital Mapping, Charting, and Geodesy Analysis Program is investigating the extension of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency's Vector Product Format (VPF) to handle a wide range of non-manifold 3D objects for modeling and simulation. The extended VPF, referred to as VPF+, makes use of a non-manifold data structure for modeling 3D synthetic environments. The data structure uses a boundary representation method.
Three-dimensional terrain representation plays an important role in a number of terrain database applications. Hierarchical triangulated irregular networks (TINs) provide a variable-resolution terrain representation that is based on a nested triangulation of the terrain. This paper compares and analyzes existing hierarchical triangulation techniques. The comparative analysis takes into account how aesthetically appealing and accurate the resulting terrain representation is. Parameters, such as adjacency, slivers, and streaks, are used to provide a measure on how aesthetically appealing the terrain representation is. Slivers occur when the triangulation produces thin and slivery triangles. Streaks appear when there are too many triangulations done at a given vertex. Simple mathematical expressions are derived for these parameters, thereby providing a fairer and a more easily duplicated comparison. In addition to meeting the adjacency requirement, an aesthetically pleasant hierarchical TINs generation algorithm is expected to reduce both slivers and streaks while maintaining accuracy. A comparative analysis of a number of existing approaches shows that a variant of a method originally proposed by Scarlatos exhibits better overall performance.
Various digital filters, edge detectors, histogram modification, and three-dimensional display experiments are performed on
mosaicked Geologic LOng-Range Inclined Asdic (GLORIA) acoustic imagery. These experiments have the motivation of
establishing Navy capability for viewing the seafloor-especially in deep water and in three dimensions, detecting objects on the
seafloor, and enhancing existing monochrome GLORIA imagery. It was found that a Gaussian filter with a kernel size of 5x 5
provided subjective enhancement to the lower intensity areas while some of the other filtering techniques, e.g., difference and
gradient destroyed the dynamic range of the image. Kernel sizes were found to be extremely crucial in the experiments with this
imagery, especially the median filter which did provide excellent smoothing of the imagery without sacrificing the edges. The
digital mosaicking performed on this particular data set of acoustic imagery was determined to introduce multiple artificial
artifacts. Image analysis showed the intensities (8 bit, 0-255)to follow the classic Gaussian distribution. Histogram equalization
yielded exceptional results for adding contrast (which allows the determination ofgeologicalboundaries and detection of various
seafloor objects. The vector intensity profile of the intensity offered an interesting future research objective, the correlation of
acoustic imagery to bathymetry, the measurement of the depth of large bodies of water.
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