Agile Environment
Maintaining geospatial information dominance requires an agile environment to demonstrate, assess, and integrate emerging technologies for the Army. The Army Geospatial Enterprise (AGE) Node provides the environment that meets these requirements.
The AGE Node supports integration and engineering of research efforts with operational systems, evaluation of current and emerging geospatial software, standards and standards implementations (e.g. emerging and current Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and DoD Information Technology Standards Registry (DISR) standards), experimentation, and collaboration with industry and academia.
The AGE Node includes the Army's Command Post Computing Environment (CE), Mounted CE, Mobile Handheld CE, Sensor CE, and Real-time, Safety Critical CE.
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| The AGE Node is the place where the Army develops and tests geospatial software for Programs of Record, as well as certifies its emerging Army systems. |
Supporting Interoperability
The Army Geospatial Enterprise includes hundreds of applications and systems with different architecture, infrastructure, network capabilities, and operational constraints. These systems have a requirement to use and share geospatial data, as well as interoperate with other systems.
Department of Defense and industry partners use the AGE Node to demonstrate and mitigate interoperability challenges within the geospatial domain.
The AGE Node meets the needs to integrate research and resolve interoperability issues throughout the development lifecycle. It also supports the Army’s evaluation of geospatial standards and implementations, such as Open Geospatial Consortium and National System for Geospatial-Intelligence standards.
Enabling Certification
Geospatial interoperability, or the idea that everything works together, is critical to providing situational awareness to the warfighter. Interoperability is achieved through certification of the consistent implementations of geospatial standards profiles, data models, and architectures. The AGE node provides the infrastructure to enable geospatial interoperability certification.
The Army Geospatial Information Officer is responsible for certifying geospatial interoperability in accordance with Army Regulation 115-11, Geospatial Information and Services.
Collaboration
The test and evaluation of Army Geospatial Enterprise applications and capabilities requires the collaboration of a variety of Department of Defense entities, coalition mission partners, federal agencies, industry partners, academia, and other technology providers. The AGE Node facilitates this collaboration.
Partners also use the AGE Node to innovate and shape technologies to better operate within unique Army constraints. The AGE Node provides industry with insight into the unique limitations — technological, environmental or policy-oriented — of the Army Geospatial Enterprise operational environment. This allows the Army to utilize commercial geospatial software without expensive customizations.
Benefits for Army Users and Systems
Finally, the AGE Node reduces risks of the transition of geospatial technologies to operational systems. The AGE Node does this by supporting the evaluation of the implementation of geospatial standards, data formats and architectures in new and emerging systems to improve interoperability and shorten the time to transition.
Knowledge gained through use of the AGE Node helps to shape Department of Defense and defense-industry products.