NGA Sets GEOINT Strategic Direction with Earth Builder

Last month Google and the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency started sharing details about their “GEOINT on Demand” collaboration. The project, named Earth Builder, was built specifically to enable NGA to directly use Google’s cloud-based geospatial processing power.  this capability will enhance the agency’s ability to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence to the DoD, Intelligence Community and the entire National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG).

For those not familiar, the NSG is a unified community of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) experts, producers and users organized around the goal of integrating technology, policies, capabilities and doctrine to produce GEOINT in a multi-intelligence environment. NGA is the Functional Manager for the NSG, providing strategic thinking, guidance and direction to the community concerning all aspects of GEOINT, from its acquisition to its utilization.

This move is clearly in-line with the vision outlilined last November by NGA Director Letitia A. Long in her speech at the GEOINT 2010 Conference in New Orleans. In that presentation, she outlined her new vision that involves taking advantage of key location-based applications and trends that deliver intuitive and powerful apps for solving a multiple of GEOINT challenges, as well as the importance of empowering users to easily take advantage of this new frontier of GEOINT.

Video of Director Long’s entire speech is available online.

Read more on Google’s collaboration with the NGA on the Google Enterprise Blog.

 

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