Image Matters to Support NGA’s Accelerating Map of the World Initiative

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded Image Matters LLC a contract to address some of the agency’s most pressing challenges through its Accelerating Map of the World Initiative. The initiative will deliver innovative solutions that expedite and strengthen the agency’s Map of the World (MoW). MoW is foundational to the Intelligence Community’s object-based production environment.

MoW will provide easy access to an expanded web of integrated intelligence (content within context), grounded by authoritative geospatial features, for everyday decision makers, operational users, and intelligence analysts.

Image Matters LLC was selected for its proposed linked-data strategy addressing the integration of object-based-intelligence (OBI) with foundation geospatial intelligence. NGA seeks to enhance the capability to generate, curate, analyze and share structured OBI as linked data with originating information tracking.

“This award builds upon a decade of advanced research and development into innovative analysis techniques for OBI,” said Harry Niedzwiadek, CEO of Image Matters LLC. “Our efforts began with NGA’s $1M Innovations in Geospatial Intelligence Award (2005), through which we pursued a vastly improved solution to what former Director James Clapper referred to as the ‘volume, velocity, variety and veracity (4V) problem’, known commonly today as the ‘Big Data problem’. Following this pioneering work, and complementary extended research with DARPA and others, we set our sights on next generation object-based production and analysis tools and services. Accelerating Map of the World has great potential to dramatically enhance the effectiveness and productivity of analysts, in a far more seamless and integrated fashion than ever before.”