Today, ISS announced that under the sponsorship of the Air Force Research Laboratory and direction of Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) they developed and deployed an application to enable critical infrastructure monitoring to the White House Situation Room.
The ISS team developed an application for deployment on the SPAWAR touch table framework, leveraging touch technologies to provide insight into the current status of various elements of critical infrastructure across the United States. The application provides users such as the President and his staff with the ability to view the status of any of thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure with a single tap on a touch surface.
According to Rob Rogers, Vice President of National Systems at ISS, “The touch table application for the White House presented many interesting challenges to the team. The application is really a mash-up of technologies including the ISS-developed Web Enabled Temporal Analysis System framework for data access and aggregation combined with a custom touch interface developed by ISS, utilizing the Adobe Flex framework, finally sending results to Google Earth. The President, Vice President, and the Secretary of Homeland Security have used the application and have expressed positive feedback.”
I doubt that I will ever get to see that application…
Flash on!
I was pretty impressed with that cryptic press release, lots of nice buzzwords etc – good publicity for both ISS and Adobe.
But what really struck me was the mention of Google Maps: so basically what they’re implying is that this oh so impressive setup will be utterly worthless if their internet connection and/or the Google Map servers go down?
Unless the White House or the Navy have arranged for a local copy of Google’s data, it looks like the President and his staff will be looking at carefully aggregated data that floats on top of a bunch of error tiles!
Sounds like a good way to make well-informed decisions during a “situation”.
I guess we’ll never get that explained either?!
@Patrick
The article says Google Earth, not Google Maps and the government created satellite imagery, not Google, who merely purchased old imagery from said government. I think they have the imagery they need.