ST. LOUIS—A unit within the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has begun an effort to develop an immersive environment that will start with integrating its various databases to create a digital model capability that ultimately leads to a simulated environment where planners and warfighters see no gap in the transitions among planning, training and operations in all domains, an agency official said.
The Foundation Digital Twin will automate and integrate foundational geospatial data “to provide consumers with an immersive digital experience” that is essentially based on the latest, most relevant data, Todd Johanesen, director of the Foundation GEOINT Group, said Sunday morning in a keynote address here at the annual GEOINT 2023 Symposium.
“Our model envisions it as a capability to store and deliver Foundation data to NGA consumers with the latest information to support various missions—where data is automatically gathered and assembled to support product extraction with the most relevant and current data,” he said. “We are seeking to vastly expand the notion of a digital twin to encompass that dynamic digital twin for Foundation data—the entire globe.”
Johansen later told Defense Daily that his discussion of the Foundation Digital Twin was the first public disclosure of the effort, which was conceived less than a year ago with a goal over a roughly 10-year period to get to the immersive environment.
“It’s really going to be both technology and people driven,” he said.
The Foundation Digital Twin will be an organic project that will always be updated and improved, he said.
Over the next two years, Johanesen’s group will be focused on phase one, which is building a “digital model” that organizes and integrates data across separate, largely stove-piped repositories so that it is easily searched “across all domains” and users can find what they want, he said.
This integration will mean “that when you are looking for a mission specific set of data to support your operations, you can find it, assemble it, download it, print it, whatever it is that you need to do,” he said.
Now, though, the focus is on understanding what the technology needs are, whether the technology can do what NGA wants, and are the resources available to get the technology, he said.
The second phase of the project is the “digital shadow,” which Johanesen said is a “more refined digital model” that takes advantage of the linked databases to create “the semblances of what a digital twin could look like” but it is not yet a “repeatable, constantly updated data driven environment.” The third phase is the digital twin, he said.
An easily searchable integrated database that is accurate, reliable and consistent is not an easy task.
Johanesen said the “schemas and metadata” associated with NGA’s Foundation data are “very, very complicated” and the digital twin will have to handle complex user demands.
“I mean, it could really be almost anything that people are going to be searching on when they’re looking for geospatial data, not just, ‘Hey, give me all the roads.’ It could be, ‘Give me all the roads that are this wide, that are made from this type of material, that are this long and work well under inclement weather,’” he said in the interview. “I mean the list can go on for the things that they would search for.”
The immersive environments generated by the Foundational Digital Twin will be based on the “what if” scenarios created by users and not necessarily a model developed by NGA, he said.
Referencing the example of roads, Johansen said a user of the digital twin could simulate a vehicle of a specific size and tonnage going down the road in certain conditions and figure out what would happen if the load was too heavy or the weather changes, helping the planner know whether that vehicle may be wrong choice to use in an operation.
While NGA frequently provides “hardcopy” maps to its customers, with the digital twin the agency will provide the data in a digital format that they “ingest” and “run their simulations to see what their real-world actions would be,” he said.
Ultimately, users of the digital twin will “go through the ‘What if?’ scenarios ad nauseum with our data, Johanesen said.
Once NGA has “more fidelity” around the Foundation Digital Twin effort the agency will release a Request for Information (RFI) to get help with the project. NGA will be seeking help from its traditional industry vendors but also from other sources such as
In-Q-Tel, academia, or its own accelerator that funds technology startups, he said.
It will be early fiscal year 2024 and possibly calendar year 2024 before an RFI is issued, he said.
“The most important enabler of the Foundation Digital Twin is empowering the experts in all phases of current production, delivery and use of NGA Foundation products to help define the path ahead and help us achieve Foundation Digital Twin success,” he told the audience.