Homeland Security

RadNet: A Mobile Distributed Radiation Threat Monitoring Network for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)

The threat of nuclear terrorism presents one of the most complex challenges to federal, state, and local government agencies responsible for Homeland Security. While the possibility of a "dirty bomb" is chilling, imagine the "silent bomb" scenario: Lethal concentrations of illicit radioactive material are placed in densely populated buildings or mass transit locations without any explosion. Weeks later, hospitals begin to report the effects of mass radiation poisoning, but by then it is too late for thousands of people. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory prototyped RadNet to aid in countering this threat. RadNet is a network of GPS enabled mobile devices (cell phone + PDA) fitted with gamma radiation detectors. The devices collect radiation readings and locations at fixed time intervals, and establish wireless connections for transmitting the data to a server based Internet Geographic Information System (GIS), which then stores, manages, and analyzes the data to generate "hot spot" maps depicting locations of increased radioactivity. The maps can then be quickly delivered on-line to first responders. The GIS for RadNet consists of Telemorphic's Maplicity integrated with MapServer, PostGIS, PostgreSQL

Enterprise Knowledge Discovery, Management, and Sharing

The Homeland Defense and Security mission requires rapid discovery and sharing of relevant multi-source information across responsible federal, state, and local government agencies and departments. Global InfoTek Inc. (GITI) develops advanced solutions in knowledge discovery and collaborative knowledge management. GITI's Verona™ is a powerful collaborative knowledge management tool that can be used to harness, organize, present, share, and distribute corporate knowledge throughout/across organizations involved in homeland defense using a web browser-based electronic notebook. LumINT™ is GITI's Knowledge Discovery Toolkit which enables enterprise-wide knowledge discovery services in homeland security, law enforcement, defense, and intelligence delivered via the Internet, intranet, and/or secure networks. Telemorphic's Maplicity is a key component of these solutions, providing powerful geospatial information discovery and interactive imagery exploitation, mapping, and GIS functionality in a highly portable, lightweight (350kb), and dynamic plug-n-play web environment. Read more (PDF)