NGA Research Priorities

I received the following email from Dr. Keith Clarke:

The report [Priorities for GEOINT Research at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency] is no longer embargoed, and is now publicly available in pre-release form at the following web site:

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11601.html

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I--Alan Glennon--haven't had time to read the report yet, but did skim the executive summary. The report defines the agency's top challenges for geospatial intelligence, and the body of the report describes some strategies to address those issues. These "hard problems" include,

• Achieve Persistent Tasking, Processing, Exploitation and Dissemination(TPED)


• Compress Timeline


• Exploit all forms of imagery (and intelligence)


• Share with coalition forces, partners, and communities at large


• Support Homeland Security


• Promote horizontal integration

From a GIScience perspective, the sub-problems and recommendations are where the report gets good. There is discussion of spatio-temporal database management systems, spatio-temporal data mining, visualization, grid computing for geospatial data, image data fusion across space/time/spectrum/scale, detection of moving objects from disparate data sources, and geospatial ontology.

Microsoft Windows Live Local Preview (link)

Since I've been busy and haven't mentioned it, I thought I would here. Their tech preview shows a split screen map: on top, a egocentric view of a street; on the bottom, a 2D map that includes an locator icon and its viewing direction. Our "Cognitive Issues in GIScience" class at UCSB discussed it last night. While there was a great deal of criticism regarding its current applicability as an in-car navigation system--navigation was the day's class topic. I asserted that seeing the actual building face of a destination address--and the route itself--was powerful. Anyway, there were better points made, and hopefully, others and myself can discuss them further in the future. The MSDN Channel 9 has a related video (link). They claim 10 million images are being used for Seattle alone.

Time for Google Earth

Also while I've been preparing for AAG and Ireland, I was excited to see Ogle Earth and Declan Butler report about a Creare Inc's development of an initial time-browser for Google Earth. Follow their links for further information.