The Fall 2011 issue is dedicated to the GeoInt crowd, and launches at the GeoInt Symposium in San Antonio. We discuss two of the hottest trends for geospatial intelligence: human terrain analysis and the NGA’s intended adoption of open source software.

Human Terrain Analysis

HumanGeo/Human Terrain has been a hot topic for the past few years, and now The HumanGeo Group is one of companies offering cutting-edge solutions. Their product and its creator, Abe Usher, are up for the USGIF Industry Award for the most innovative geospatial software of 2011 for DOD.  The product is ISEBOX (Integrated Socio-cultural Environment for Behavior Observation Exploitation), which uses variable precision data encodings of location to facilitate non-obvious pattern detection and predictive analysis in the geospatial domain.

Open Source Software for NGA

The NGA surprised some when they announced in September at the FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial) Conference that they are going to move more towards Open Source Software. Imaging Notes provides the story from a main solution provider, RadiantBlue Technologies. Their product, Omar, is a web-based processing and distribution solution that addresses many of the GeoInt 3.0 goals, articulated by NGA Director Letitia Long a year ago at the GeoInt Symposium. That vision for GeoInt 3.0 includes remote user access to imagery and products, collaboration, and manipulation of rapidly evolving agile technologies.