US Army Topographic Engineering Center, Contracts Office (CETEC-CT), 7701 Telegraph Rd, Alexandria, VA 22315-3864

A -- BROAD AGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT FOR TOPOGRAPHIC SCIENCE RESEARCH SOL BAA 98-01 DUE 102098 POC John L. Griffin 703-428-6265 e-mail griffin@tec.army.mil The U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center (TEC) is issuing Broad Area Announcement (BAA) 98-01 soliciting contractual assistance for research and development in the topographic sciences. The formal BAA can be found at www.tec.army.mil. TEC is a Corps of Engineers facility that offers research and development (R&D) support, as well as technical assistance, to a variety of customers throughout the Department of Army and other Government agencies. TEC is the lead Army facility for conducting research on advanced topographic systems and terrain exploitation software. TEC's mission is to provide the uniformed soldier, at all echelons, with superior knowledge of the battlefield and to support the nation's civil and environmental initiatives through research, development, and application of expertise in topographic and related sciences. The three topics for which TEC is seeking proposals under this BAA are: Topic 1, Terrain and Climate Data Generation; Topic 2, Exploitation Capabilities Enhancements; and Topic 3, Database and Information Management. The objective of Topic 1 to enhance the capability to spread, derive, or infer terrain and climate information. This capability would assist the military planner in; (a) providing more detailed, accurate terrain information about a battlefield and (b) examination of levels of climate that would impact fielded materiel, personnel, and selected operations at intended deployment locations. Technology breakthroughs which can advance TEC's mission include: (1) Investigating current methodologies for the spreading interpolation/ extrapolation) of terrain and climatic information; (2) Developing empirical methods (geostatistical, inferential, rule-based) that allow the spreading of various terrain and climatic parameters over a spatial surface and methods to assess the goodness-of-fit of the spreading algorithms; (3) Developing algorithms that integrate kriging, co-kriging, and multi variate kriging, or other suitable replacement modeling environment for interpolation, into a commercial Unix-based GIS system (i.e. Arc/Info) to facilitate terrain-based mapping; and (4) Using remotely sensed data for landscape characterization at various scales based on the intended use of the collected data. The objective of Topic 2 is to perform analysis and exploitation of multi- and hyper-spectral data sets taken from remote platforms. The exploitation efforts cover a variety of applications to include: rapid mapping, disaster assessment, pollution monitoring, crop growth, geological exploration, drug enforcement, terrain trafficability, and surveillance of military subjects /targeting. Of specific interest are concepts on integrating and automating the data analysis/ exploitation activities for these applications while minimizing the human intervention requirement. Additional efforts may be needed in spectral resolution analysis, spectral versus spatial tradeoff analysis, and clutter/ noise content analysis. Enhancements to existing algorithms and/or new approaches will be entertained.Assemblage of these optimized algorithms into a common system is required. The objective of Topic 3 is to develop technologies in support of three major technology thrusts essential to management and integration of geospatial data and information. They are 1) the ability to link common features across geospatial products of varying spatial, thematic and temporal accuracy and scale, leading to 2) new feature/information-based management, query and data synthesis functionality for geospatial (terrain) information, leading to 3) the ability to disseminate and integrate terrain information in a distributed seamless database context. Database management, query, and control research thrusts will address methods for data synthesis across source to generate a topologically consistent map constituting the best available data and information, or a map representing the best applicable data for a user-specified mission. (0289)

Loren Data Corp. http://www.ld.com (SYN# 0004 19971020\A-0004.SOL)