Visualization Framework for Navy Tactical Applications

Current tactical display applications, while adequately providing operator tools needed to assess the data and gain an awareness of the tactical situation, have not achieved seamless integration of decision aides in a cohesive geographic presentation. Specifically, systems suffer from the too many geos syndrome whereby operators are able to view geographic presentations but are unable to get the visual content they want together on a single geo display surface. These federated environments attempt to achieve integration and consistency of multiple geographic display subsystems using a static allocation of display space to individual applications (via a combination of window tiling and control of the visibility state of application windows. The primary technical issue is one of combining the visual content and user interfaces of separately developed software into an integrated product that makes efficient use of display space. The focus of this proposal is on solving this issue using integration within a single application instance. This proposal seeks to design and develop a flexible cross-platform Java-based GIS application framework. The framework is designed to allow a deliverable application to be constructed from a core application supplied by the framework, supplemented by dynamically loaded content and functionality provided by one or more development teams. The primary field of use is for tactical geographic based displays requiring rapid and frequent content updates.