April 19

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I present the results of our reader survey; host an appeal to local governments by the national Geospatial One Stop program; report on a congressional hearing on voice over IP (VoIP) and the future of the 9-1-1 system; bring you the comments on the hearing by a representative of Rosum Corporation; and report on Boeing's selection of Rosum as a subcontractor for DARPA's Robust Surface Navigation Program. Plus, my usual dose of press releases.

As always, I encourage your feedback.

— Matteo Luccio

Who You Are

We recently asked you to tell us a little about yourselves. Here are your responses, as percentages:

Q1. Which title best describes you?

• Manager — 21.3
• Technician — 19.5
• Other — 14.8
• Engineer — 14.1
• Surveyor — 9.7
• Scientist — 8.3
• Research Analyst — 6.5
• Planner — 3.6
• Policymaker — 1.4
• Journalist — 0.7

Q2. Which category best describes your involvement with GIS?

• End-User — 37.5
• Manager — 26.7
• Data provider — 18.8
• Software Developer — 8.7
• Researcher — 8.3

Q3. What is your organization's primary business function?

• Other — 20.9
• Mapping — 17.9
• Software Development — 13.6
• Geographic Analysis — 9.9
• Utility Management — 9.2
• Education or Media — 5.9
• Resource Management — 5.5
• IT — 4.8
• Scientific Research — 4.4
• Data Acquisition — 4.0
• Image Processing — 2.2
• Research and Planning — 1.8

Q4. Within the geospatial industry, with which of the following vertical markets are you most closely associated?

• Government — 44.0
• Other — 14.4
• Utilities — 9.7
• Agriculture v7.2
• Education — 5.4
• Transportation — 4.7
• Real Estate — 4.3
• Telecommunications — 2.5
• Energy — 1.8
• Oil & Gas — 1.4
• Healthcare — 1.1
• Insurance — 1.1
• Media — 0.7
• Retail — 0.7
• Banking — 0.4
• Manufacturing — 0.4

Q5. Do you use GIS Monitor as a resource when making your purchasing decisions?

• No — 54.9
• Yes — 45.1

Q6. Are you involved with major purchasing decisions within your company?

• Yes — 68.2
• No — 31.8

and the winners are…

From all of the respondents to our survey, we randomly selected four, to each of whom we will send a $50 gift certificate for dinner at a restaurant near them:

Vern Vogt, Supervisor, Georeferencing Services, Integrated Land Management Bureau, Province of British Columbia, Canada

Linda Y. Haven, CAD/Drafter, Columbus Regional Airport Authority, Columbus, Ohio

Matthew McCready, Geographer, U.S Census Bureau, Geography Division, National Geographic Partnerships Team

[As of press time, the fourth winner had not yet responded to my request for permission to print his/her name.]

GOS Reaches Out To Local Governments

Web Mapping Services Important Toward Building National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI)

Sam Wear, the Assistant CIO (GIS) for Westchester County, New York, is on a temporary detail with the U.S. Geological Survey (U.S.G.S.), serving as the national local government liaison to the Geospatial One Stop. His focus is building local government capacity in GOS. He sent GIS Monitor the following:

The Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) project encourages local governments to register and publish metadata for Web mapping services on the GOS portal at www.geodata.gov.

Increased availability of data and Web mapping services through the GOS portal significantly supports local, state, tribal, and federal government agencies, and improves homeland security and disaster relief efforts across the country. It is widely recognized that local governments make a tremendous contribution towards building the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI).

New enhancements to the GOS portal include improved spatial search functions, tools to identify potential partners in data acquisition efforts, easy-to-use registration forms to start publishing metadata records, and greater access to a growing number of on-line Web mapping services from across the country.

Local governments interested in getting started with publishing metadata for Web mapping services — which can take as little as 15 minutes — are encouraged to visit the www.geodata.gov or contact Sam Wear, local government liaison to GOS, at stw1@westchestergov.com or 914-995-3047.

U.S. Senate Hearing on VoIP and 9-1-1

In 1968, the only people who communicated over long distances by flipping open small, hand-held devices were the crew of the starship Enterprise. That was the year when the 9-1-1 system was launched, and yet its basic architecture has not changed to reflect the huge changes in technology and in people's communications habits. Additionally, according to the National Emergency Number Association, Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) in rural areas covering 20 percent of the country and 50 percent of the counties still do not have enhanced 9-1-1 (E9-1-1) capability—which provides to 911 operators the location of callers who use traditional land lines—and only 46 percent of PSAPs, covering one third of the population, have the necessary technology to locate wireless 9-1-1 callers.

Today, in addition to many more ways of communicating—by voice, e-mail, instant messaging, etc.—we also have a large variety of sensors that could provide additional information to emergency dispatchers—such as digital photos and videos from cell phones, data from automatic crash notification systems, alerts from medical devices, and bio-chemical information from sensors in subways. The current 9-1-1 infrastructure, however, is not able to handle such inputs.

All of this is relevant to the GIS community, for two reasons. First, because location, of course, is a key component of every emergency call. Second, because the prodigious expansion in the popularity of cell phones—and, hence, of the number of 9-1-1 calls originating from them—led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Congress to mandate wireless carriers to phase in, over a period of a few years, the capability to locate handsets and pass that information on to 9-1-1 operators at PSAPs. This requirement to location-enable millions of handsets, in turn, laid the groundwork for the development of location-based services (LBS).

Now, the growth of Internet telephony—or voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)—is at a similar inflection point and poses analogous challenges to PSAPs. Popular VoIP services include Vonage and Skype. As VoIP technology matured, service providers began to interconnect VoIP with the public telephone network and marketed the VoIP service as a cheap alternative to traditional phone service. Initially, the FCC allowed them to experiment with various ways to connect with PSAPs. However, as people's inability to call 9-1-1 using VoIP began to make headlines, the FCC acted: in 2005 it required that VoIP services that interconnect with the public telephone network begin to provide 9-1-1 service and provide notice to their consumers concerning the 9-1-1 limitations.

However, implementing E9-1-1 poses serious technical challenges for VoIP, both because it uses the Internet and because users can be nomadic, making it very difficult to geolocate them. A further obstacle is that, to fully interconnect VoIP to 9-1-1, VoIP service providers must interconnect with the 9-1-1 telephone trunk—owned and controlled by their competitors, the traditional fixed-line telephone carriers.

Last week, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the United States Senate held a hearing on VoIP and the future of 9-1-1 services as well as a bill on the subject, S. 428, introduced by Senators Nelson and Snowe earlier this year.

Five witnesses testified at the hearing:

• Dale Hatfield, former Chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology, independent consultant, and Adjunct Professor in the Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder
• Wanda McCarley, President of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO), International and Operations and Training Manager for the Tarrant County 9-1-1 District
• Jason Barbour, President of NENA and 9-1-1 Director for Johnston County, North Carolina
• Sharon O'Leary, Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, and Secretary of Vonage, a VoIP provider
• Stephen Meer, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Intrado Incorporated—which, he said, "provides the core of North America's 9-1-1 call routing, data management, and communications infrastructure and is a central figure in the integration of multiple technologies that feed into the 9-1-1 system."

Following are some of the comments they made on the issues most relevant for GIS.

Indoor location challenges. As people "increasingly rely upon VoIP or cellular phones for voice communication, sometimes fully substituting such services in lieu of traditional wireline services," Hatfield said, VoIP and cellular calls are commonly made from inside buildings. However, he pointed out, while signals from nearby cell phone towers, at times boosted by various devices and systems deployed inside buildings, often allow cellular subscribers to complete 9-1-1 calls from deep within buildings, the signals from distant GPS satellites are too weak there for handset-embedded GPS receivers to use. The result is that PSAPs receive their calls but are unable to locate them. He stressed the need for the FCC to "encourage stakeholders to agree on a common testing methodology … for assessing location accuracy involved in finding 9-1-1 callers" and that this revised methodology "take into account increased indoor usage of wireless devices."

Furthermore, according to Hatfield, when VoIP customers relocate their computer—usually from an indoor location to another one, because VoIP requires a broadband connection for good performance—they often fail to manually re-enter their location information. "Thus, in considering the interrelationship between wireless and VoIP E-9-1-1 requirements, it is quite possible that there could be substantial benefits from developing an automatic location system that would serve both needs."

Integration of various sensors and systems. "With the camera phone that I have in my pocket," Hatfield said, "in calling E-9-1-1, I could send a picture of a suspect's car speeding away from a crime scene because modern, all-digital packet switched networks based upon the IP suite are perfectly capable of conveying voice, data, image and even video traffic. The challenges to that vision include not only the still-remaining limitations of the existing wireline E-9-1-1 infrastructure but also the ability of the PSAP to receive, process, and display such information."

According to McCarley, "Next generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) systems, will ultimately occur within a broader array of interconnected networks comprehensively supporting emergency services; from public access to those services to the delivery of emergency information to call-takers, dispatchers, and first responders. This development is an evolutionary process to enable the general public to make a 9-1-1 call from any wired, wireless, or IP-based device."

"The same IP network that will allow a 9-1-1 center to receive voice, text, video and multi-media information from the emergency calling public," Barbour said, "should be the same network that enables increased information sharing, voice and data, on a variety of traditional and new devices among all aspects of the emergency response system." He pointed out that NENA "started with 'One nation — One number,' and now we add, 'any device, from anywhere, at anytime.'"

Funding. All of the speakers agreed that, as people increasingly switch from wireline to wireless and VoIP telephone, funding the 9-1-1 system is increasingly a challenge, because it has traditionally been funded by a surcharge on wireline telephone subscribers within a given service area. McCarley said that her organization "strongly supports" the provision of the bill that ensures the ability of state and local governments to "impose or collect a 9-1-1 fee from VoIP service providers."

Liability parity. "Some 9-1-1 authorities are reluctant, or even refuse, to complete VoIP emergency calls," O'Leary said, "because they lack the legal safeguards that protect them from liability," which exist today for wireline and wireless emergency calls. She called for extending these protections to VoIP, as did Meer.

Access to E9-1-1 infrastructure. "Nomadic VoIP providers, like Vonage, need access to parts of the telephone network to complete a 9-1-1 call," O'Leary said. "Unfortunately, there are areas in the country where Vonage cannot gain access to these vital network elements. By including access provisions in the legislation, you ensure that the 9-1-1 system remains a public trust, not a tool to block competition." Barbour said that NENA supports a provision in Senate bill 428 that requires owners of the E9-1-1 infrastructure to provide access to VoIP providers who require it to provide E9-1-1 service.

Rosum Corporation's Comments on the Hearing

I discussed the hearing with Jon Metzler, Director of Business Development for Rosum Corporation, which manufactures devices that supplement GPS by deriving positioning from broadcast TV signals. The company is happy to see the emphasis on the need for indoor 9-1-1 capability. In particular, Metzler pointed to comments by Hatfield about the need for hybrid offerings, "which is precisely what we are."

Some of the themes of the hearing—such as funding problems for PSAPs and the need for the 9-1-1 system having to adapt to new technology—have been around for more than a decade. So, what's new? According to Metzler, new data shows that the majority of wireless calls, in general, and wireless 9-1-1 calls specifically, are being made from indoors, and that people are increasingly doing away with their wireline phone completely, varying from 5 percent of households in San Francisco to as many as 19 percent in Detroit. These data, Metzler says, have highlighted the need for 'in-building' 9-1-1.

How does Rosum's technology help address this problem? Metzler explains that when his company began integrating them with GPS receivers, TV tuners for computers were large, heavy, and power hungry. Now, however, as the market grows for notebook PCs able to function as entertainment centers, the number of tv-capable devices has dramatically increased and tuners' size, cost, and power requirements have dropped enormously. "So, it makes our sales effort much, much easier."

At the hearing, Stephen Meer, Intrado's CTO, exhorted Congress to think ahead and not just react to the challenges posed to the 9-1-1 system by every new communications technology. "We wholeheartedly agree with Meer's remarks," Metzler says. "It is not about any one location technology or method; it is about being prepared to accept or work with location information generated by whatever offering is in the field at that point in time. We are a device-based technology, but I think that this is broader than any one company's technology. Say that you do have a sensor-equipped building with IP connectivity: you might call 9-1-1 through that building, we don't know. But I think that Meer is precisely correct in pointing out that that option may occur, so we should be ready."

With regards to how emergency calls are routed, "we are upstream from that," Metzler says, "in that we are a location technology. That said, I think it is in everyone's interest to make sure that that location information is transportable, that the mechanism for transporting it is robust, and that it is transporting it where the call takers can do something with it."

DARPA's Robust Surface Navigation Program

The Boeing Company has awarded to Rosum Corporation a contract in support of Boeing's development for the Robust Surface Navigation Program (RSN) of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The RSN program seeks to exploit "signals of opportunity" to help deliver location information to U.S. troops in environments where GPS works poorly or not at all—such as in urban canyons, inside buildings, and in the presence of GPS jammers. Rosum will develop subsystems utilizing its proprietary positioning technology, which uses terrestrial broadcast signals, such as those from television transmitters. The project team also includes Navsys and Shared Spectrum.

Rosum, whose founding team includes the original architects of the GPS constellation, derives positioning from either unmodified broadcast TV signals or a combination of TV and GPS signals. The company has also developed a deployable signal offering in support of defense and first response applications.

According to Bart Ferrell, Boeing Phantom Works program manager for Precision Navigation Programs, the goal of the 15-month DARPA program, executed out of the Army's Battle Command Applications Division, is "to evaluate the available signals of opportunity, with the intent of using them to make a navigation system much more robust." In addition to those from television transmitters, such signals may include those from radio transmitters and cell phone towers, as well as from Iridium, Galileo, and GLONASS satellites. The final product, he says, should be "a very robust, integrated system that uses space-based signals, like GPS, along with terrestrial-based signals."

Phase 1 of the contract began on February 1 and is worth $2.6 million, according to Ferrell. It focuses, he says, on "assessing the enabling technologies." Phase 2 would then be the development of a prototype.

I can see how Rosum's technology can work well in advanced industrial countries, where there are many such signals of opportunity, but what about in such places as Afghanistan? "This system will be designed to be used in all areas of the globe," Ferrell told me, "so one of the challenging aspects of this program is to assess which signals are in fact available and which ones would be suitable to use in this integrated system." A key question is whether a given transmission includes a signal that can be used for ranging. In areas where there are absolutely no usable signals, U.S. forces could deploy stand-alone beacons.

An RSN receiver would be similar in form factor to current hand-held GPS receivers. "Obviously, we don't want to burden the foot soldier with a huge piece of equipment," Ferrell says. "Our goal would be to make this similar in size and weight to what is used today in theater. But, until we understand the suitability of these signals and what has to be done to use them, we won't know for sure."

Will Rosum's hybrid positioning module (HPM) be at the heart of the new device? "I think that is a very strong possibility," Ferrell says, "but at this point we are assessing all of those systems and I don't want to predict which one we are going to use." Jon Metzler, Rosum's Director of Business Development, is even more cautious: "As a subcontractor to Boeing, our intent is to build a solution where the sum of the various ranges is greater than the value of the individual parts. Our goal is to provide TV ranges. If there is a location where TV is dominant, that's one thing. If there's a location where other systems are dominant, that's fine as well. While I won't speak to the end deliverable, our goal as a company is to provide specific ranges to the integrated solution that Boeing comes up with."

» Back to our GIS Monitor APR 2007 Issue