That’s the sort of capability that company president A.J. ft’ takes about as long to query in iSpatial as it does to read that statement out loud.” The company explains in a white paper. For example, ‘show me all commercial real estate on Wall Street above the 34 th floor where the rent is less than $100/sq. “The end result is the ability to search for content geospatially as well as by arbitrary attributes, including the use of comparison operators. The display can change depending on the rank (access level) of different users, the capabilities of the user’s device, the strength of the Internet connection, or other factors. The program also lets you populate your map and run it in real time by querying objects stored in your database.
The Special Forces members’ insight and operational needs are reflected in the product as it exists today.Įssentially iSpatial is a software kit that allows users to draw and share Google Maps, Google Earth (or OpenLayers, an open source alternative) with anyone that the user chooses. Bradin and other Special Forces members began a dialogue with Thermopylae. Some folks in the Defense Department believed it could be useful for military operations. State wanted a way to keep track of diplomats and department folks in Iraq.
In 2008, Arlington-based Thermopylae Science and Technology launched a Google Maps-based and geo-intelligence product called iSpatial for the State Department. “Just little things like getting the water right, you can drastically improve the quality of life in these places…and commercial works. What Bradin and other (Army) Special Forces operatives needed was a way to do operational planning and management using map data that wasn’t highly restricted, using the same sort of commercially available map data that millions of smart phone users access all the time. “In 2015, a special forces guy walking around with classified imagery can’t do shit…If you’re in North Africa or in Asia Pacific, there’s probably not a NATO partner there.” “It actually diminishes the operation some times,” Bradin told Defense One. “We were able to share with our NATO partners, but not the Afghans standing right next to them,” Bradin said. government and much of it was classified under a program called Warrior View. The problem was that the owner of much of that imagery was the U.S. And the amount of information that could be shared between them, including satellite and drone pictures, was severely limited. They shared the same broad objective, disrupting the Taliban’s operations, but they originated from different forces, agencies and armies.
In 2010, Army Col. Stuart Bradin (retired) was in Afghanistan along with special forces operatives from France and other NATO countries, Drug Enforcement Agency operatives and elite units from the Afghan National Directorate of Security.