TerraGo Blog

Note to TerraGo readers: I originally wrote this post for GISCafe.com and it ran on 5/11/11. I'm re-posting here for your benefit.

Every year, organizations around the world spend tens of billions of dollars on the collection, analysis, and management of geospatial data. Despite this significant investment, the geospatial intelligence sector faces some major challenges.

Historically much of the geospatial intelligence effort has focused on the collection and analysis of data, whereas the timely distribution and sharing of the resulting information with those outside the GIS department often takes a back seat. Organizations need to be able to provide rapid self-service and increasingly proactive delivery of spatial information, enable end-users to personalize intelligence, collect additional intelligence in the context of their missions, and effectively share new intelligence with others in the field and across the extended enterprise. Otherwise, the base data and analysis never return their full potential value to the enterprise.

The U.S. military has been dealing with massive volumes of imagery data that, once it has been synthesized and disseminated, is often no longer viable for the current mission at hand. And, as Brig. Gen. Vincent Stewart, Director of Intelligence, U.S Marine Corps, once said about finding the right Intelligence in a sea of data: “It is no longer looking for a needle in a haystack, but now it’s a needle in a stack of needles.” Analysts need to work longer and harder to uncover valuable intelligence; when one of those precious few discoveries is made, quickly sharing that information with a broader audience is imperative.

A major challenge is that warfighters, first responders, utility workers, and other field-based professionals and their management often lack the sophisticated software, training, and/or the connectivity typically required to make the most of such intelligence. As a result, potentially invaluable geospatial assets are frequently not fully leveraged, and opportunities for greater situational awareness, collaboration, and productivity are lost.

To help overcome these challenges the defense and intelligence community, along with a growing number of federal civilian agencies, state and local governments and commercial users, have widely adopted TerraGo® geospatial collaboration software and GeoPDF® solutions as a means to produce, access, update and share maps, and imagery as well as georeferenced audio, video and other spatial information. GeoPDF maps, imagery and mapbooks are small, portable, easy to access and update containers of spatial intelligence, useful to those who are working in connected or offline environments. They can be served through “self-service” kiosks or even updated proactively leveraging embedded services. Moreover, they are naturally able to be shared within organizations as well as between organizations, addressing the challenges of today’s heterogeneous spatial enterprise. TerraGo software and GeoPDF maps and imagery help enterprises collaborate more effectively, respond more rapidly to events and realize a greater return on geospatial intelligence assets, including people, technology and data.

-Richard M. Cobb, President & CEO, TerraGo Technologies

As posted on 5/11/11 on GISCafe.com