The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is rapidly transforming itself from an organization that focuses on supplying maps and other geospatial products into an organization that’s also expected to deliver fast and reliable analysis of geospatial data.
C4ISR & Networks recently spoke with John Goolgasian, NGA’s director, source operations and management directorate, for his view on how the agency is handling the transition and its role in a world of proliferating sensors, big data, mobile devices and shadowy, yet technologically savvy adversaries.
C4ISR: What is the biggest operational challenge facing the NGA?
JOHN GOOLGASIAN: The commercialization, or, as our director likes to call it, the democratization of space.
Once governments of the world were the sole authorities over space, and now there’s a number of commercial entities that are launching GEOINT sensors into space. From very small satellites, the size of breadboxes, to refrigerators to car-sized [satellites]. And over the next few years, these providers … will float from tens to hundreds of these satellites.
Where once we had a finite resource that we had to manage, now we’re going to have more or less an ever-present imagery collection of the Earth, from lower resolution in the 3- to 5-meter sense to the higher resolution submeter area.
Our challenge isn’t going to be what we collect anymore; it’s going to be how we look at the information [and] what we do with it. [We’re] changing our model for how we look at things … figure out how to use automated algorithms better, figure out how to use services better, to tell me when something has changed, to go look at it [instead of] having human eyes on every image that is taken.
So it becomes more of a big data issue, where we’re going to have more content than we have the ability to sift through in our traditional way. The challenge is really changing our business processes, helping our workforce with technology and with training, to deal with the big data issues we’re going to have because of this explosion of sensors in space.
C4ISR: Do you feel that industry is helping with all of this?
GOOLGASIAN: Industry in some areas is leading this with us. We have great partners across industry, and now we’re getting more into these nontraditional partners. Their market is across the world and across industry, so it’s a different partnership that we have. But they’re very eager, excited, to work with us, as we are to work with them.
We find things we’ve never been able to find before and do things we’ve never been able to do because we have different people looking at our issue, for different reasons, than we had in the past.
C4ISR: How important do you feel social media is?
GOOLGASIAN: We have, underneath my organization, an open-source group that looks at not just social media, but open source from all different areas. The explosion of GEOINT and the geospatial industry has helped us tremendously here, too.
As you know, a lot of social media now has a geotag to it. A photo taken in social media will have the locational information embedded in the image itself. So we are able to use this information much easier in different ways than we have in the past. And this will continue to grow and grow, whether it’s an early identification of an issue that we want to look at with other means, or just as a source of big data that we can harvest to look at trends over time.
C4ISR: How will this NGA evolution ultimately impact war fighters?
GOOLGASIAN: A lot of the automated capabilities and data-transfer activities that we’re doing today are impacting the war fighters. One of the areas we’re pushing for … is the use of handheld devices — tablets — to get our littoral and maritime information into [war fighters’] hands. [They are] much quicker, much more flexible than in our traditional paper products. We can transfer information seamlessly, quickly, to anywhere in the world, small bandwidth areas as well.
