NIMA is a combat support organization within the US military support structure, which was formed in the fall of 1996. It is a combination of the old Defense Mapping Agency and a number of elements within the imagery intelligence community and currently numbers about 7,000 employees. This agency is responsible for the generation, databasing, distribution, and standardization of geospatial information within the military and intelligence community.

Pathfinder is an ongoing effort to survey, organize, and evaluate commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software packages, which can be used within NIMA and by customers supported by NIMA. It focuses on multi-agency requirements analysis and often involves foreign associates in the process. Pathfinder98 focused on geospatial and imagery analysis tools. Pathfinder99 is currently underway and is focused on scene visualization.

The Pathfinder process is comprised of several steps:

• Summarizing of product capabilities against government-derived requirements. These results are captured in a database, which can be accessed by other contractors and government agencies.
• Down-selection of products from the database for further analysis by the Pathfinder Subject Manner Experts (SMEs).
• Oral presentation of product capabilities from the down-selected products by the vendors. These presentations are conducted in an open meeting in front of a panel of SMEs. SMEs are allowed to ask questions and grade each product after each presentation.
• Summarizing of the graded results and a final down-selection to a set of products which bear further, hands-on analysis by the SMEs and appropriate military agencies.
• The final, down-selected products are demonstrated and evaluated in a hands-on setting at military agencies or vendor sites.
• A final report is compiled by the Pathfinder team and published for general knowledge. Products are isolated and a select group is recommended for insertion into military agencies.

In the case of Pathfinder98, over 100 products were databased and analyzed throughout the process described above. PCI products were one of only 3 products recommended for insertion after nearly 6 months of evaluation. PCI faired extremely well in the "broadly based tools" categories against the likes of ERDAS IMAGINE and GDE’s Socet Set product line. PCI tools showed extremely well in terms of production of geospatial products (orthophotos, feature data, elevation data) and use of the generated data and analysis in imagery analysis scenarios. The main categories of evaluation included the Human-Machine Interface, interoperability, and support of government and commercial data and standards. Participants included many NIMA mapping and imagery analysis elements from NIMA itself, all of the services, and Canadian J2.

A summary of the effort is available at http://geoipt.nima.mil/prg_docs/documents/ under Volumes 12 (Technical Overview) and 13 (Technology Assessment, Chapter 6). The following table summarizes the results and is from the Volume 13 discussion:

Human Computer Interface: User viewpoint about tool's ability to contribute to mission: assurability, controllability, reasonability, consistency, simplicity, impression of organizational acceptance.

Least desirable ---- ---- ---- ---- Most acceptable

Interoperability: Review from data submitted for tool to operate on platforms from the most commonly found in current organizations to those least commonly found.

Least diversity ---- ---- ---- ---- Widest diversity

Data and Standards: Review of submitted tool data for input and output of government and commercial data formats from support to most major formats through at least one major format to proprietary formats only.