Simulation Terrain Data Bases in the US Army often use unique standards that are not compatible with many of the advanced commercial terrain products being developed by industry (e.g. Google Earth). The US Army Simulation to Mission Command Interoperability Overarching Integrated Product Team (SIMCI OIPT) Geospatial Initiative has been working to synchronize Terrain Data for Army Command and Control (C2) and Simulation systems. Generating the terrain data for training Simulations (and C2 Systems) is extremely expensive, requires extensive lead-time and lacks agility. Both the Simulation and C2 Communities have their own unique terrain data standards, however C2 systems are moving toward, and starting to adopt, new and emerging Open Standards used by industry.

This paper will focus on identifying Open Standards that can be used by both communities to represent geospatial information and also stream geospatial data via web services to client applications. We provide an overview of the common (and not so common) geospatial standards for 1) Data Content, 2) Metadata, and 3) Services. We examine the current and future use of these standards for transmission, analysis, and presentation of geospatial data. Open Standards such as Web Map Service (WMS) and Tile Map Service (TMS) for elevation and imagery, and Web Feature Service (WFS) and Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) Simple Features for feature data will be included. We also analyze the open source libraries and tools that use these standards, such as the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) from the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The adoption of advanced commercial terrain products by the Simulation and C2 Communities would be invaluable for improving the agility and interoperability of terrain data for the Warfighter, as well as make available petabytes of potential data sources that can be used in the terrain database generation process. Recently, the SIMCI Geospatial Initiative has facilitated a Simulation Working Group under the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation to work with Industry to determine Geospatial Open Standards for the M&S Community.