Spatial Data Mining Toolkit for Generating Mission Specific Data Sets (MSDS)

The Army today must be prepared to embark on contingency and emergency operations with very little advance notice in distant parts of the world. In such an environment, the geospatial information requirements to support operations cannot be accurately or adequately specified until close to the commencement of the mission. To be responsive to the needs of such missions, it is imperative to have a process for the rapid and timely production of Mission Specific Data Sets (MSDS). The traditional manual process for MSDS production is extremely labor intensive and time consuming. There is a need therefore for an automated tool to support rapid generation of MSDS with the required degree of fidelity from lower fidelity data sources. Spatial data mining techniques that have been developed in the recent past represent a key enabling technology for building tools to assist a topographer in rapidly generating MSDS feature data. Leveraging a number of novel spatial data mining techniques, Architecture Technology Corporation will develop an automation tool called TopoAssistant (Topographer's Assistant) to assist Army topographers in building "just-in-time" MSDS. The proposed Phase I effort will develop the architecture and design of the TopoAssistant software tool and establish its implementation feasibility through a rapid prototype.