About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

One of our core missions at FortiusOne is to enable many more people to explore, create, and share maps – to democratize geospatial capabilities. Even in government markets, which have been big users of GIS tools, the expense and technical sophistication required often cause bottlenecks in the preparation of maps. Government customers are also facing critical challenges in making information from the field accessible throughout their organizations – increasing collective intelligence from the edges of the network.

We have teamed with Lockheed Martin to leverage our intelligent mapping services to address these problems in government markets. Lockheed has a long history in the geospatial space and has been very progressive in embracing advanced Web 2.0 technologies such as Intelligent Mapping and Wikis.

I thought it might be helpful to provide an example of the kinds of problems we are addressing with Lockheed. Let’s take a fictitious scenario of a military operation dealing with terrorist attacks in Iraq. Suppose I’m Sergeant Gorman and I’ve uploaded data on a spree of attacks that my patrol collected over the past week.

A GIS analyst at headquarters, in reviewing my data along with historical data from the last three years, notices a pattern of increasing Shia activity around Samarra and sends an alert to field units. The alert prompts me to scan for data on attacks tagged Shia and Samarra, where I find a photo from a previous attack that shows one of the locals we had suspected of being a Shia ring leader.

I post a geo-blog noting that this individual has been suspected of coordinating attacks in my sector. A flurry of responses from other patrol leaders indicates that the same individual has been seen in proximity of other attacks. A GIS analyst at headquarters validates the findings and generates a command report, which results in the order to apprehend the suspect. On our next patrol into Samarra, we locate him and discover a complex cell of terrorist Shia activity in the area.

While the account above is completely fictional, hopefully it conveys the power of democratizing geospatial information throughout an entire organization. The same principles apply to a variety of other environments, such as disaster response, homeland security, and intelligence, where enabling the entire organization to explore, create, and share geospatial information can enhance mission effectiveness. We are excited about the partnership with Lockheed Martin to bring these capabilities to market.

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