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.

Popularity: 15% [?]

It has been an interesting week with an article in the Washington Post and InformationWeek on the launch of GeoIQ and the upcoming data repository. Thought I‘d take some time to go into more detail with what we have in mind combing the two into the foundation of a geospatial software as a service. GeoIQ is the first step – allowing non technical users to analyze their data to make better location based decisions. In order to make better decisions you need good data, and this is where the data repository comes in.

Data is a problem that is not exclusive to us, but something that is critical to growth of web mapping in total. O’Reily, through Where 2.0, has given this topic considerable attention and we are hoping we can add our small bit to the solution. My frustration with geospatial data goes back almost a decade when we first started looking for open source data. Back then it was the beginning of the .com boom and we were looking for spatial data on fiber optic infrastructure to see if we could sort out if the Internet was going to be the end of geography. At the time the pundits were saying that the Internet would mean location was no longer important because you would be able to connect to the Internet and work from anywhere. So, we were mapping where the nuts and bolts of the Internet to see what locations could support the new business of the Internet and if the geography was actually changing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 9% [?]