Changes and Challenges at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Speaking at the Intergraph 2010 user Conference, Paul Weise, the Chief Functional Manager, and Director, Office of Geospatial Intelligence Management for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) address the challenges associated with coordinating a national system for geospatial intelligence.

There are a number of changes in the GEOINT community and at the NGA. Vice Admiral Murrett has stepped down and Letitia Long is the new NGA chief. Former NGA chief and deputy undersecretary for defense intelligence at the Department of Defense, Jim Clapper, is the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI). Both have specialized and knowledgeable skill about GEOINT activities.

Weise said that so much of GEOINT is done in a crisis situation.  "Efficiency is not the measure of how you address a crisis; it’s the response time that matters… It creates a challenge for managing these situations." And the NGA had become very effective at supporting crisis situations. Howe was this accomplished? "The approach that has been taken since 9/11 is to ‘throw money at it.’ Now, the money is drying up," said Weise. The Secretary of Defense has said “enough is enough.” Weise said they are about to take a ‘meat axe’ to many DoD programs. "Since the money is drying up we need to work smarter," said Weise.

To accomplish more with less, Weise said that state and local governments as well as private companies will become a critical part of the national GEOINT community that includes federal organizations, combatant commands and the intelligence community (IC).

NGA’s functional management is concerned with improving collaboration and coordination across the DoD, IC and International Partners and Weise acknowledges the responsibility of publishing their data standards is what many are waiting to understand and know. He pledged to work with the commercial industry and academia and international partners to identify and embrace promising technology and architectural standards.

One point of contention for Weise: Full Motion Video (FMV). He said that the UAV’s were already flying in Afghanistan and Iraq before a strategy could be put in place for the entire life cycle for the system (archiving, collecting, storing, and analyzing the data). Too many owners of FMV with each one of them having a different training curriculum. Very little had been done in coordinating the many agencies and combat commands that utilize UAVs and FMV, but Weiss believes that is changing but late in getting out ahead of this issue.

Intergraph Geospatial Embarking on Goal Toward Native 64-bit Architecture

In a briefing delivered by Intergraph’s Security, Government and Infrastructure (SG&I) division CTO, Mark Doherty, he reported that the company is moving forward in developing the next generation software based on a native 64-bit architecture, evolving to a complete SOA model, and providing new web clients based on AJAX and Silverlight. The first versions of this next generation of software is planned for late 2011.

Some new developments that clients will see is the integration of Microsoft Visual Studio Workflow Designer embedded inside of GeoMedia to more easily create customer applications. SG&I is evaluating cloud infrastructure through Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2 services, and GeoMedia WebMap has already been successfully prototyped on Amazon EC2. Doherty believes that some software components will have to be re-architected in order to take advantage of full cloud services.

Some key trends that Doherty sees in architecting and deploying solutions are:

• Thick to thin and smart clients – slow evolution underway and will continue to happen
• Dedicated servers to virtualized infrastructure, Cloud computing (private and public) clouds
• On premise IT – moving toward SaaS and hosted solutions

Doherty sees that the ultimate goal is to have thin/smart clients that rely upon SG&I services inside a cloud platform.

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UAV’s Fill the Skies: So Much Data, So Few Ways to Analyze It

At the Intergraph 2010 conference, the defense and intelligence group was demonstrating their Motion Video Analyst (MVA) solutions to help manage data from the growing usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in support of the warfighting efforts in the Middle East.

As a consequence of too much data, the need for analysts is likewise increasing.  Algorithms are being developed for pattern recognition but the data will be useful only so long as the data is handled correctly said Rob Mott of Intergraph. In addition, the establishment of persistent surveillance by UAVs is likely resulting in even greater volumes of data.

Data volumes of video are so massive they are now being described in terms of "Yottabytes."

Intergraph has brought to market Motion Video Exploitation, a combination of several technology convergences: Integrated flight plans; real time video enhancements; ground target indicators; geospatially referenced video, storage and search.

And even the gaming industry is being tapped for innovation. Intergraph is adopting an Xbox controller to be integrated into the MVA button assignments in hopes of helping the analysts to be more effective. The company believes it alone can take multiple video feeds and integrate them into a 2D mapping environment.

#GeoMedia 3D Launched by #Intergraph

Today, Intergraph launched GeoMedia 3D, an add-on product for GeoMedia, the company’s flagship geospatial software. It will be released with GeoMedia v6.1.8 in Q4 this year. The product uses technology from Skyline and includes features such as:

• freely flying through a 3D map view with six degrees of freedom
• creating and editing waypoints
• recording and saving a video .avi file
• create viewshed views
• scale-based thematic maps using the Z value that would be associated with a map feature
• display building models with the ability to add building textures and colors
• thematic prism mapping
• the ability to extrude/hover features above/below surface by user defined value or geometry z value or by attribute or expression.
• importing pre-built city models using CityGML
• supports Google formats: KML, KMZ and DAE

LBS Tidbits

MapMyFitness received $5 million in Series A funding from Austin Venture and will move its HQ from Denver to Austin. The company offers MapMyRun, MapMyTri, etc.

- press release

MTV is partnering with Foursquare for a special badge for those who get themselves tested for STDs. The hope is that when one friend checks in and gets the badge, others will too.

- AP

The Boston Globe has release its own real estate app for the iPhone. One of the goals? To get more eyeballs for Globe ads.

- Poytner.org

Booyah is up and running with Facebook Places with an app called InCrowd.

Touted as part game and part social utility, InCrowd is unique in the LBS space as it goes beyond collecting check-ins and allows users to experience a virtual world corresponding the real world visited in Places. Like a location-based Second Life, InCrowd app users can create their own customizable avatars, “interact” with old and new friends nearby as well as accumulate status and virtual goods.

It’s aimed at high school and college kids which is perhaps why I don’t really understand it.

- TechCrunch

AOL (who?) has acquires social app company RallyUp which offer a location-based social network of the same name on iPhones.

- IntoMobile