As we kick off the year’s premier geospatial intelligence symposium, GEOINT 2015, we're thrilled to share some of the work we've been doing that aligns with the conference theme of broadening the discipline’s appeal to sectors beyond the early-adopter defense and intelligence communities. Earlier this month, the presence of U.S. Chief Technology Officer Megan Smith at OpenStreetMap’s annual State of the Map conference in New York City was concrete evidence for our team that geospatial innovation is front-of-mind with some of our most senior national policymakers. Collaboration is one way that we’re building a bigger tent for geospatial information, as our partners across a broad ecosystem are delivering transformational value for a broad range of applications. We are seeing tremendous engagement and innovation across the network, fueled largely by those who are fully embracing the emerging Geospatial Big Data paradigm in which our joint assets are enabling solutions with greater scale and velocity. Maxar was proud to cosponsor the first-ever GEOINT Hackathon this month, which saw an incredibly diverse group of geo- and non-geo programmers and data scientists compete to build a predictive analytic model for disease outbreak. Using raster, vector, and social media data sets, the winning team created an open-source python library to model the spread of Ebola in western Africa, which has been made available on Github for others to use and build upon. Here are a few more examples of the initiatives that we looking forward to showcasing at GEOINT 2015:
- Our first GEOINT with Vricon, a joint venture between Saab and Maxar that aims to deliver satellite imagery-derived 3D and digital elevation content under timelines and quality standards that were only theoretically possible in the past.
- Our crowdsourcing platform is an exciting component of our Geospatial Big Data innovation portfolio. We are constantly tuning this capability and generating unique, unconventional partnerships with a wide array of organizations every time we spin up a campaign. Our registered crowd is in the millions, and campaigns can summon groups large and small depending on the sort of mobilization that’s needed.
- We are looking forward to sharing other news about all of our Geospatial Big Data (GBD) offerings, but our GBD Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution stands out, as we recently partnered with Harris to enable subscription-based access to ENVI Analytics for a wide array of imagery datasets across low-, mid-, and very high-resolution sources, spanning various modalities.
- To help unlock the value our customers demand, we help them source and capture datasets from partners that are keen to find new outlets for their imagery through the various enrichment paths that we and our ecosystem offer. Much exciting work is happening in this domain as we are determined to provision the best data in the quickest way for the task at hand.
- Our WorldView-3 data collection capabilities remain unrivaled in the industry and we are now able to deliver its highest resolution imagery to all our customers. WorldView-3’s 30 cm imagery and unique spectral capabilities make it unmatched in the commercial environment.
- The emergence of high-resolution and medium-resolution electro-optical and radar collectors, the expansion of volunteer data pipelines emanating from social media sources, the popularity of platforms like OpenStreetMap that can dramatically lower the cost of mapping, and the advanced large-scale data processing technologies that can help make sense of this all represent huge opportunities across the user spectrum.
These are just a few recent highlights of the innovation we jointly deliver with our partners, customers, and the global geo community. Our ecosystem partners, including our customers, continue to demand a focus on mission-relevant data services that can help them best allocate their thin resources on the human tasks that drive the greatest consequence.With the variety and volume of datasets coming within easy reach, today we must remain focused on providing user-centric solutions that deliver the most value to the mission in the short- and long-term. To that end, we've assembled a series of demonstrations at the GEOINT that demonstrate how we are harnessing innovation to:
- See the earth clearly and in new ways, leveraging new capabilities of the ever-expanding commercial market;
- Analyze vast amounts of Geospatial Big Data to reveal relationships and generate new insights;
- Anticipate, discover, and resolve gaps faster and with greater confidence; and
- Respond more quickly to enable mission success by delivering better (not more) information.