Geospatial Center drills down on GIS for the Army

Army Geospatial Center Director Joseph Fontanella is responsible for providing geospatial expertise across multiple customer communities and technical disciplines ranging from operations, intelligence and acquisition to research and development, and modeling and simulation. The center he oversees does this by providing topographic, geodetic and geospatial information to the Army and the larger Department of Defense. The center employs both forward-deployed and reach-back elements. As the Army’s Geospatial Information Officer, Fontanella is responsible for collecting and validating geospatial requirements, formulating policy, setting priorities and securing resources in the support of the Army Geospatial Enterprise.

C4ISRNET: What is the mission of the Army Geospatial Center [AGC]?

Fontanella: Our job is to provide timely, accurate [geospatial intelligence] products and services within the framework of functional areas that support the Army Geospatial Enterprise: warfighter support, systems acquisition and program management, enterprise development and acquisition support. We also provide support in ways the national agency can’t, and we have our own collection capability. We’re a source of geospatial expertise to the Defense Department, FBI and others. We also set standards and enforce compliance, but the overriding goal is to enhance the ability of the commander to map his or her battle space.

C4ISRNET: How close are we to a common operating environment?

Fontanella: We’re coordinating with NGA [National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] and supporting studies that optimize technology investments as they relate to common overlays, formats and ways of depicting 3-D data. We’re trying to build a ground war fighter geospatial data model. The endgame is to ensure that soldiers have the most timely and reliable information that we can bring to them, in a format that’s useful to them. If you look at how GIS [geographic information systems] technology has become more user-friendly over the years — we can take some of the credit for that because we have some ability to shape industry behavior. We’ve been pushing for open standards, and for the elimination of stovepiped systems with proprietary formats. The goal, of course, is to become platform agnostic systemwide.