Army Appoints Service's First Geospatial Information Officer (GIO)
Written by US Army
19 March 2008
ALEXANDRIA, Va. - Mr. Robert Burkhardt, director of the Engineer Research and Development Center's Topographic Engineering Center, was recently appointed as the Army's first Geospatial Information Officer (GIO) by Headquarters, Department of the Army's Geospatial-Enterprise Governance Board.
As GIO, Mr. Burkhardt serves as the Army's central manager responsible for coordination, assessment, and synchronization of all Army policies and standardization requirements for the geospatial information enterprise, which will help enable interoperability across battle command systems, bringing the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines closer to the realization of a unified common operational picture (COP). This COP allows the Department of Defense to deploy assets efficiently and effectively by providing the warfighter with the integrated capability to receive, correlate, and display a common tactical picture, including planning applications that may include location of friendly, hostile, and neutral units, assets, and reference points.
"Geospatial data is the foundation for a common operational picture, and the lack of policy and standards in this area prevents a unified COP today," said Mr. Burkhardt. "The technology is available to enable battle command systems to collect information once and allow discovery and exploitation by all, however, without these standards, it is difficult to present unified, understandable solutions within and outside of the Army."
The Geospatial-Enterprise Governance Board, co-chaired by Lieutenant General Robert Van Antwerp, Chief of Engineers, and Lieutenant General John Kimmons, Deputy Chief of Staff, G-2, addresses Army Geospatial-Enterprise issues impacting current and future force requirements while striving to administer and facilitate the development of a net-enabled Army geospatial enterprise. Such an enterprise allows actionable geospatial information to be tasked, posted, processed, and used as needed from the National to the Soldier level through a distributed database and architecture based on a common core of software, standards, data formats, and algorithms. A key component of this shared enterprise will be established policy, in conjunction with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, to pass value-added data back to national data stores. ###
The Engineer Research and Development Center's (ERDC) Topographic Engineering Center (TEC), located in Alexandria, Va., provides the warfighter with superior knowledge of the operational environment and supports the nation's civil and environmental initiatives through research, development, and the application of expertise in the topographic and related sciences. The ERDC is the premier research and development facility for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, consisting of seven laboratories at four geographical sites with more than 2,000 employees and an annual research program exceeding $1 billion. It conducts research in both military and civil works mission areas for the Department of Defense and the nation.
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