Securing harbors and coastlines includes the task of monitoring and detecting people or vehicles attempting to enter a confined/protected area, other than at the legitimate access points. Modern systems should provide a total solution - including sensors, software, hardware, and a "control unit" to ensure complete security. Today a standard border security system may include several platforms, providing short-range, medium-range and long-range surveillance like perimeter protection, cameras and radars on observation towers, mobile surface and subsurface observation platforms - including land vehicles as well as maritime vessels or observation aerostats and aerial vehicles carrying all kinds of sensors to give a broader view of an area of interest. The ability to integrate those different types of surveillance means is essential to get a full picture and situation awareness. The paper introduces the concept of a universal ground station as a dynamic integrator for heterogeneous sensor platforms and sensor types depending on the surveillance needs of a specific maritime area of interest. A standardized interface to outside information systems is described taking into account the future need for combined civil and military operations for maritime safety and security

Borders are extremely vulnerable and prone to terrorist attacks, smuggling and illegal immigration. To achieve enhanced situation awareness it is necessary to fuse sensor and information data. By automated fusion of referenced and associated data an aggregation of raw sensor data is achieved.Within the project SOBCAH (Surveillance of Borders, Coastlines and Harbors), an architecture was developed and tested that supports the sharing of information from heterogeneous sources. Additionally techniques of data fusion within video data were used to enhance information and provide operators with relevant details of an event.

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To achieve knowledge superiority in today’s operations interoperability is the key. Budget restrictions as well as the complexity and multiplicity of threats combined with the fact that not single nations but whole areas are subject to attacks force nations to collaborate and share information as appropriate. Multiple data and information sources produce different kinds of data, real time and non-real time, in different formats that are disseminated to the respective command and control level for further distribution. The data is most of the time highly sensitive and restricted in terms of sharing. The question is how to make this data available to the right people at the right time with the right granularity. The Coalition Shared Data concept aims to provide a solution to these questions. It has been developed within several multinational projects and evolved over time. A continuous improvement process was established and resulted in the adaptation of the architecture as well as the technical solution and the processes it supports. Coming from the idea of making use of existing standards and basing the concept on sharing of data through standardized interfaces and formats and enabling metadata based query the concept merged with a more sophisticated service based approach. The paper addresses concepts for information sharing to facilitate interoperability between heterogeneous distributed systems. It introduces the methods that were used and the challenges that had to be overcome. Furthermore, the paper gives a perspective how the concept could be used in the future and what measures have to be taken to successfully bring it into operations

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