NATO Establishes Core Geographic Services

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An industry team led by Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) and ESRI will develop the Core Geographic Services project that will provide the baseline for the all the alliance’s geospatial systems currently under development. This core will establish a common ground establishing the Geographic Information System (GIS) standards for effective and timely cooperation and collaboration between NATO staff, from the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) to NATO’s deployable headquarters (HQ).

Common standards will enable commanders, analysts, and other NATO network users to fuse geospatial content from Core Geographic Services with other forms of information for command and control, intelligence, and logistics applications. The Core Geographic Services form a key architectural building block in support of NATO’s service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The system will be based on ESRI’s ArcGIS server which provides services to NATO staff through a Web viewer and to other NATO systems through standard Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), interfaces. For geospatial analysis NATO’s staff will use ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop with Job Tracking for ArcGIS (JTX) workflow manager.