NGA and DigitalGlobe Open Source Toolkit to Harness the Power of Collaborative Mapping
23 June 2015 - 1:42AM
Business Wire
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and DigitalGlobe
(NYSE: DGI) have partnered to release an open source software
toolkit designed to harness the power of crowdsourced mapping for
Geospatial Big Data Analytics. The open source project Hootenanny
provides a scalable processing engine and interactive editing
interface to enable rapid conflation of map features generated from
satellite imagery, UAVs, and mobile devices.
In less than a decade crowdsourced mapping communities like
OpenStreetMap™ have attracted over 2.5 million volunteers who have
digitized more than 130 million buildings and 1.3 million miles of
roads. Countless other organizations and individuals are using
satellite imagery and other methods to capture the geometry and
metadata of roads, buildings, and points of interest. To create
high-quality maps and enable analytic functions like routing,
suitability analysis, or predictive modeling it is important to
unify multiple sources to create the best available database.
“The commercialization of GEOINT is leading to exponential
growth of publicly available geospatial information,” said Chris
Rasmussen, NGA’s public software development lead. “Hootenanny as
an open source project will enable new levels of data sharing
across the community that will increase our nation’s ability to
quickly respond to emerging threats. This is a pro-active move that
steers into the collaborative mapping environment to derive more
value from unclassified sources.”
Hootenanny leverages the open architecture of OpenStreetMap™ to
facilitate integration of diverse geospatial datasets into a common
key value data structure. An open library of conflation algorithms
applies various techniques to unify the geometry and metadata of
topographic features. Conflicts can be visualized and resolved
through an interactive application built on the iD Editor, an open
source map editing tool developed by Mapbox. Conflated datasets can
be exported in a variety of GIS formats including ESRI Shapefile,
File Geodatabase, Web Feature Service, and native OpenStreetMap™
formats. Hootenanny also enables Geospatial Extract Transform Load
(ETL) capabilities supporting various schemas such as Topographic
Data Store (TDS), and Multi-National Geospatial Co-Production
Program (MGCP).
“DigitalGlobe is rapidly evolving our business beyond satellite
imagery into the world of Geospatial Big Data,” said Tony Frazier,
SVP U.S. Government Solutions at DigitalGlobe. “Our human geography
product contains over 1.6 million POIs aggregated across 1,500
unique sources. Hootenanny will help us more effectively fuse the
data we extract from our imagery with other sources of publically
available information.”
Hootenanny is available
at: https://github.com/ngageoint/hootenanny. The software use,
modification, and distribution rights are stipulated within
the General Public License (GPL). DigitalGlobe and NGA will be
hosting a Hootenanny MeetUp at the Washington D.C. Convention
Center on Wednesday, June 24 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET in Room
143A.
About DigitalGlobe
DigitalGlobe is a leading provider of commercial high-resolution
earth observation and advanced geospatial solutions that help
decision makers better understand our changing planet in order to
save lives, resources and time. Sourced from the world's leading
constellation, our imagery solutions deliver unmatched coverage and
capacity to meet our customers' most demanding mission
requirements. Each day customers in defense and intelligence,
public safety, civil agencies, map making and analysis,
environmental monitoring, oil and gas exploration, infrastructure
management, navigation technology, and providers of location-based
services depend on DigitalGlobe data, information, technology and
expertise to gain actionable insight.
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