Just a quick post today - I wanted to call attention to an article by David Talbot of MIT's Technology Review, entitled "A Technology Surges" about how DARPA produced a kind of wikified Google Maps for Iraq-stationed patrol commanders.

The application, called the "Tactical Ground Reporting System" or, because the military loves acronyms, "TIGR" - is a wonderful thing. Junior officers who command patrols study data telling them about key buildings, location data on past attacks, etc., and then they can add the information they found out on their patrol to the map-centered database for the next patrol to study. Using cameras with embedded GPS technology, they can take pictures of the scene on the ground and add them to the database as well.

And of course, the system was designed with the Iraq theatre's networking performance needs in mind.

Deploying it widely required dealing with two main challenges raised by Iraq's spotty data connections: how to synchronize scattered copies of the same database, any one of which a returning patrol leader might modify, and how to give soldiers multimedia information without crashing the system. One solution was a network that carefully rations out bandwidth. For example, the default mode for any photograph is a thumbnail version. A soldier has to click on the thumbnail to see a larger version and will get a response only if bandwidth allows.

With future advances, such a database can be updated and accessed live from the patrol in-country.

The next step, says Maeda, is to install it in Humvees and other military vehicles, allowing soldiers to download and act on new information in real time. Some of these vehicles already have some low-bandwidth connections, and Maeda says DARPA is working on ways to make the software work using these thin pipes.

It's not that any of this should sound unfamiliar. Google Maps mashups for sales data, tourists, and even MMORPG players are used in a similar manner for similar purposes. The significant thing is overcoming the challenges in an unstable, wartime environment where network performance is never a certainty.