[BrianMcCl]

Stanford Research Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International

The same name is a really good question. But since SRI TerraVision and the Art+Com TerraVision both seems to be started at the same time around 1993 and both use the same SGI hardware (an Onyx) I could image that Brian from SGI was in contact with both teams.

[amayne]

This SRI document is based on research funded by a ARPA grant:

"This work was supported in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency under Contract F19628-92-C-0071."

Which implies that it was in development long before the date on the PDF.

Earth mapping was a very hot field in the 1980s with most of it being funded by intelligence agencies and classified.