BAE Systems has entered into an agreement to supply the Air Force with access to the company’s Workflow Improvement Module, an add-on license that integrates BAE Systems’ advanced geospatial-intelligence (GEOINT) software package Socet GXP to its GXP Xplorer data management application and also enables Socet GXP to search and discover products while eliminating the need to switch between tools, according to company representatives.
BAE spokesman Charles Ratzer yesterday said terms were not available. Darren Stelle, BAE Army account manager for geospatial exploitation products, said yesterday the Air Force requested the company build this capability because the service determined most of its imagery analysts spent about 40 percent of their daily time trying to discover the important data they need to do research for effective intelligence products.
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| BAE Systems’ WebView for Xplorer GXP in use at the AUSA show in Washington. Photo: Defense Daily. |
BAE said in a statement the Workflow Improvement Module improves workflow performance by building into the standard Socet GXP multiport and providing reference imagery and products geospatially-overlapping with original imagery automatically. This, the company said, can result in a time savings of 20 to 30 minutes per finished product.
Stelle said the Air Force has used Socet GXP for years and recently invested in GXP Xplorer for data discovery. BAE said GXP Xplorer provides a convenient way to manage and access images, terrain, features, maps, charts, videos and reports, among others. Stelle said the two products sometimes aren’t very convenient to use at the same time, saying if you want to use Xplorer GXP, you have to leave Socet GXP, open a web browser for Xplorer GXP, do data discovery and bring it back to Socet GXP.
“Not that many extra button clicks, but it is significant if you add it up, day after day, by thousands of analysts,” Stelle said yesterday at the Association of the United States Army’s (AUSA) annual conference in Washington.
Stelle said the Air Force asked BAE to create a capability that could save analysts’ time. When an analyst brought up an image of a certain area, say a city neighborhood, Stelle said it would have Socet GXP utilize Xplorer GXP’s catalog and directly return to analysts all of the relevant information based on the image up on the screen at the time. Not only will the Workflow Improvement Module show them the relevant data, Stelle said, but it will also allow analysts to set up a criteria to allow, for example, the last three years of imagery for the area or perhaps what he called change detection.
Stelle said BAE is hoping the Army will acquire Workflow Improvement Module licenses since it uses both Socet GPX and Xplorer.
BAE also yesterday rolled out its GXP WebView add-on module for Xplorer GXP, a lightweight, web browser-like Electronic Light Table (ELT) designed as a quick and easy tool for report creation and simple image viewing. Integrated with the Xplorer GXP search capability, WebView provides fast, HTML 5 access to imagery of any format, as well as functionality to modify the image, exploit it and publish the resulting finished product, BAE said in a statement.
Stelle said WebView is perfect for the all-source analyst, or maybe the manager type that doesn’t necessarily need a full-blown Socet GXP, but rather needs something that can very quickly and easily bring up an image, annotate it with accuracy and publish it to a Microsoft [MSFT] PowerPoint-like product for easy sharing.
“The cost is also 1/10 the amount of Socet GPX per (license),” Stelle said.
Stelle said WebView was developed in the past year and just formally released in the summer. BAE will continue to add capability and functionality, Stelle said. While WebView may never stand “side-by-side” to the functionality of Socet GXP, its advantage of being easily accessible, with no install and patches to continually update, will continue to make WebView attractive, Stelle said.