An enterprise geospatial application to support expeditionary naval warfare

The planning and support of military naval expeditionary operations relies on precise environmental data, which must be available on time, at the right place and in the requested format. These data sets, usually obtained from a wide number of sensors (satellites, sonars) and models (meteorological and oceanographic), have a common feature: the geospatial component. This paper presents a client-server Geographic Information System, developed at the NATO Undersea Research Centre, based on an enterprise Java application and a geospatial database, to store, convert, fuse and deliver the above-mentioned data sets. The system is also able to run applications deployed on the server to produce new products (for tactical decision support) from the data stored in the database. Users may use many types of client applications to connect to the server, ranging from thin clients, like a web browser, to thick clients, like ESRI ArcMap/ArcView (provided with ad-hoc extensions).