nga tech focus areas - nga.mil | national geospatial … · 2019-05-30 · nga tech focus areas a g...

NGA TECH FOCUS AREAS A Guide for Industry Interaction

2 Section NGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction

2019 GEOINT SYMPOSIUM NGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction

NGA INDUSTRY INTERACTION GUIDEThe GEOINT Symposium provides National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) employees exceptional opportunities to engage with experts from industry, academia and government while exploring new products, techniques and tools. These interactions help NGA identify potential technologies, innovations and partnerships to augment capabilities and evolve intelligence tradecraft – critical activities for NGA’s mission today and even more important for mission success in the future.

The challenges of the future will require NGA to learn and adapt faster than our adversaries to protect our nation and our allies’ interests as we deliver key insights at the speed of relevance. This guide outlines some of our hard problems, focus areas and technological needs and aims to streamline conversations at the 2019 GEOINT Symposium between NGA employees and exhibitors.

The enduring technology needs of NGA are based on our mission. For all of these needs - from our need to enhance and continuously improve our ability to monitor enduring threats, assess emerging issues, map and model the world, conduct deep research of long-term intelligence topics - NGA relies on our industry partners to provide innovative solutions to meet mission challenges. Technology solutions to these focus areas should: operate in a scalable hybrid cloud architecture both on and off premise; converge into our SecDevOps environment, be service-oriented, reusable across the enterprise and include application programming interfaces to allow real-time interconnectivity; operate on all security domains; handle content at all classification levels; and manage access according to a user’s work role, authorization and need to know. Solutions should also have simple, intuitive user interfaces and include training in multiple formats —such as topical training videos, FAQ documents and instruction manuals —to help NGA analysts learn and integrate solutions into their workflows. The needs described in this document are not exhaustive; however, they are the primary hard problems that NGA analysts and technologists are currently facing.

Section 3NGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction

2019 GEOINT SYMPOSIUMNGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction

NGA TECHNOLOGY FOCUS AREASThese focus areas in this guide represent key aspects of NGA’s current and future mission needs, but should not be considered an exhaustive list or Request for Information. For more information on NGA’s technology focus areas, please contact [email protected] or visit NGA BOOTH #453.

DATA ANALYTICS AND VISUALIZATIONNGA analysts need web-based tools to analyze and visually explore multiple petabytes of geospatial data — including imagery, video sources, and foundation data in multiple dimensions and formats, such as Shapefile, Extensible Markup Language, and Geospatial JavaScript Object Notation, and spatially enabled big-data stores, such as Elastic, PostGIS or NoSQL databases. The tools must also allow NGA analysts, scientists and technologists to continue to analyze data that is unstructured or structured to the National System for Geospatial Intelligence Application Schema and complies with Intelligence Community (IC) Directives for quality and sourcing. Tools must provide NGA analysts the flexibility to conduct basic statistical operations via automated processes or perform advanced statistical analyses by manually conditioning, scripting and coding data. Data analytics and visualization tools must allow data to be assessed:

SPATIALLY AND TEMPORALLY: NGA analysts need to analyze and integrate data sets in multiple spatial dimensions that occur over time to identify temporal trends, visualize correlations, and determine anomalies and outliers.

QUANTITATIVELY: NGA analysts need to conduct statistical analysis to describe significant relationships and infer conclusions between data sets, including the statistical methodologies commonly used for supervised machine learning algorithms.

EXPLORATORY: NGA analysts need to explore and visually represent data to formulate hypotheses, determine characteristics and convey results using visual techniques such as histograms, plots, charts and tables.

LINK: NGA analysts need to view, assess and store data in graph databases to arrange topology, analyze networks and relationships, perform semantic queries, and search for patterns.

NGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction


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ADVANCED GEOINT EXPLOITATIONCOMPUTER VISION AND MACHINE LEARNING: NGA analysts need computer vision tools to preprocess imagery, automatically identify features and objects, and assess change in remotely sensed overhead imagery and full-motion video. The tools should be capable of running multiple algorithms and analytics that are trainable and tunable by users with optional support from engineers and operate within GEOINT exploitation tools, such as electronic light tables and other imagery exploitation programs. The resultant data needs to: maintain lineage and provenance to the original imagery source and computer vision algorithm; be structured according to a user-defined schema of attributes and metadata; allow for access to other geoprocessing, conflation, validation and other data services; and be formatted for export to databases to automatically inform activity models, cue subsequent collection and generate automated reports and alerts. In the near term — one to two years — the algorithms need to conform to tradecraft standards and a validation process to be done through the National System for GEOINT’s governance fora. Computer vision and other deep learning tools need to provide fidelity to the following levels of analysis and applicability:

DETECTION: Objects and changes in a scene can be detected with little or no description. For example, the tool can detect the arrival of an object in a reporting position or the change in the shape of a feature, such as body of water or the perimeter of a facility. Automatic extraction of foundation feature geometries and their further defining attributes with the highest measure of accuracy and speed from various sources, reducing labor-intensive manual extraction hours.

IDENTIFICATION: Detected objects must be categorized at a broad level of general order of battle or foundational feature. For example, the computer vision tool can detect an object and determine if it is a ship, aircraft, vehicle, building, road or other feature.

CLASSIFICATION: Detected objects can be categorized within an order of battle or other object class. For example, the tool can determine if a detected aircraft is a strategic bomber or a fighter, if a ship is a destroyer or aircraft carrier, or if a vehicle is a sedan or a main battle tank.

CHARACTERIZATION: Detected objects can be recognized and identified with the highest level of specificity. For example, the tool can characterize —and correlate to the object’s Department of Defense Equipment Code and assign a confidence level as



part of the object’s metadata — an object is T-90 main battle tank, Su-35 Flanker fighter aircraft or Typhoon ballistic missile submarine. For foundational GEOINT, objects can be characterized as physical features, either man-made, topographic, aeronautical, maritime or other domain.

CONFLATION: This combines at least two data sets into one new data set creating an improved composite data set.

DATA VALIDATION: This is the evaluation of the content, structure and quality of the data by exploring data relationships within the data.

METADATA TAGGING: This is the automated population of accurate mandatory metadata information during the data production process.

GENERALIZATION: Create and maintain mapping and feature data at the largest scale possible, and abstract, reduce or simplify original content for use at smaller scales or resolution.

GEOINT EXPLOITATION ENVIRONMENT: NGA analysts need a spatial data environment for conducting GEOINT analysis and exploitation of all the geospatial data relevant to their intelligence problem. The space should function as a web-based environment for exploiting imagery using a web-based electronic light table, conducting GIS analysis and manually collecting structured observations and feature data, while also serving as an interface to the GEOINT data automatically generated by computer vision analytics. The environment must be able to connect to other web-based databases and services and allow users to import data in multiple formats, such as Shapefile, Extensible Markup Language, Geospatial JavaScript Object Notation, and spatially enabled big-data stores such as Elastic, PostGIS or NoSQL databases.

ACTIVITY MODELINGNGA analysts and scientists need to build machine-readable activity models, complexes and sets that capture their knowledge about intelligence problems. Analysts will use those models to generate and test hypotheses, identify indicators, and assess cause and effect. Analysts will use also those models to contextualize the GEOINT data from computer vision analytics and other sources in order to identify intelligence collection gaps and tip follow-on actions. Analysts need to share and collaborate on those activity models with IC counterparts and other partners at different classification levels and across multiple networks. Some special research areas include CBRNE, water/food security and adversarial activity.

6 Section NGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction


EARTH MODELINGNGA constantly seeks to improve its ability to model the physical earth by seeking advancements in technology to improve the terrestrial/celestial reference frame, gravity, magnetics, manmade and natural feature extraction/attribution, bathymetric models, topographic, and infrastructure models.

COLLECTIONNGA constantly seeks technology to improve its ability to manage collection of remotely sensed data in all forms (satellite, airborne, terrestrial) and consumable data (open, commercial, location-based, text and published data services, etc.). NGA is seeking technology to automate tipping and queuing, discovery, retrieval, collection optimization, and orchestration of all sources to achieve the most efficient delivery and access to analysts and scientists.

SEARCH AND DISCOVERYNGA analysts and scientists need to efficiently search through structured and unstructured data and information that resides within NGA’s internal networks, on shared networks we operate and manage with partners, and on external networks operated by our partners.

INTERNAL: NGA analysts need to easily discover geospatial content, existing data sets and product holdings within databases, websites and file systems that may not be indexed. Analysts also need to search NGA’s networks for corporate policies, guidance and reference material.

SHARED AND EXTERNAL: NGA analysts need to search for intelligence reports, information, and structured and unstructured data on shared and external networks. To maximize efficiency and identify the data and information most related to an analyst’s intelligence problem, search and discovery tools should incorporate trainable artificial intelligence that can learn how an analyst works and recommend additional related data sets or information. Relevant information needs to find analysts, rather than analysts always having to find data.

DATA MANAGEMENT: NGA is interested in capabilities to increase the utility, discoverability, and accessibility of GEOINT data and content (mission and otherwise). Large quantities of GEOINT data have little or no textual information that would lend



itself to metadata extraction. This data includes geospatial content and data sets, product holdings within databases, websites, non-indexed file systems, external reports, corporate information, and structured and unstructured data of various types. Methods, techniques, and practices to alleviate the user work load in, or automation of, capturing and applying metadata to both new and legacy data and content are sought.

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND DATA-DRIVEN PRODUCTIONNGA analysts and technologists need to understand and track how customers are viewing, consuming, and using the data, products and intelligence reports analysts are creating. This will allow analysts and supervisors to predict the content that will be most valuable to consumers and make data-driven mission management decisions in applying appropriate levels of effort against requirements. Business intelligence tools should capture quantitative metrics, including tracking when an analyst’s data or intelligence product is used or cited in a subsequent report, and incorporate feedback mechanisms so that customers can provide input on the value of an analyst’s work.

Mark Munsell Chief Technology Officer National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

For more information about NGA or a copy of the updated 2025 NGA STRATEGY, visit NGA BOOTH #453.

NGA Tech Focus Areas | A Guide for Industry Interaction


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nga tech focus areas - nga.mil | national geospatial … · 2019-05-30 · nga tech focus areas a g...

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