News Report
As announced in a recent press release, GeoEye received two new awards worth more than $25 million for providing Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT) products to the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and Boeing, respectively.
In the first of these two contracts, GeoEye will supply a significant amount of value-added commercial imagery over a large geographic area and distribute it through the Company's EnhancedView Web Hosting Service. The EnhancedView Web Hosting Service makes commercial imagery readily accessible to licensed federal customers across the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence.
As part of this new Enhanced GEOINT Delivery award, GeoEye will expand the EnhancedView Web Hosting Service to support third-party data, crisis imagery and new government portals.
The Technology
GeoEye's EnhancedView Web Hosting Service (WHS) provides users with password protected, online access to unclassified, high-resolution imagery within hours of its collection. The EnhancedView WHS evolved from the NGA's Rapid Delivery of Online GEOINT (RDOG) system that began operations in April 2010. GeoEye built the EnhancedView WHS to support users across the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG). NSG members and partners have recently used the EnhancedView WHS to improve emergency response to natural disasters in Japan and USA.
Users can access imagery through Esri's ArcGIS, Google Earth and other Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant tools and automatically receive notifications when new imagery is available for their area of interest.
The EnhancedView WHS is powered by GeoEye's online access platform, EyeQ. EyeQ enables thousands of concurrent users to easily access and download hundreds of terabytes of high-resolution imagery. Recent commercial applications have combined GeoEye-1 and IKONOS satellite imagery and MJ Harden aerial imagery with data from commercial radar providers and the USDA National Agriculture Imagery Program.
The Context
GeoEye's award is authorized under the EnhancedView award that GeoEye received from the NGA in August 2010. Through the EnhancedView program, the U.S. government has made a significant commitment to the commercial imaging industry. The EnhancedView awards enable commercial data providers to create innovative new products that exploit existing imagery collection and production services, resulting in the immediate delivery of information services to federal, state, local and civil users. They support the National System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) mission with timely data collection, multisource production and hosting services for immediate response, maintenance and monitoring, while incorporating evolving standards and information security requirements. This enhanced commercial GEOINT architecture allows for near realtime insertion and support for warfighters, the intelligence community, map production, humanitarian relief, and environmental and crisis response.
Commercial providers now have the opportunity to accelerate their traditional role of producing superior quality location intelligence, to include delivering products and services directly to government end-users with varying security requirements to support this significant paradigm shift in the U.S. government’s vision and mission.
Technologies made available during the EnhancedView era and beyond will provide product quality and accuracy that will be unparalleled within the GEOINT industry. As change occurs with modification or inclusion of new sensors, sources or products, technologies will continue to evolve to meet the evolving needs of tomorrow’s programs or users.
Comments
Chris Incardona, GeoEye's senior director of Government Programs – NGA, said, "We are proud to serve the NGA and other government agencies by delivering cost-effective geospatial solutions that anticipate the growing demands of their user base. These awards are a testament to the NGA's commitment to serve its federal user community with easy access to the most precise and up-to-date imagery. We will continue to expand our on-demand access capabilities with near real-time, map-ready imagery and information services."
"We have made steady investments in our EyeQ platform so our customers can quickly access and share precise imagery products to perform analysis and manage crisis response," said Chris Incardona. "The EnhancedView Web Hosting Service is the next step in our commitment to providing multi-source products, services and dissemination capabilities to help the NGA deliver online, on-demand geospatial intelligence."
References: GeoEye (1,2), V1 Magazine (3); Geospatial Intelligence Forum (4)
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