Vol. 10 No. 4 July/August 2012
On My Mind:

Partnerships Prepare NGA for Future National 

Security Challenges

The global security environment continues to evolve at an unprecedented rate. 

In the wake of the death of Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring and the Obama 

administration’s call for more robust engagement in the Asia-Pacific region, the 

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency must prepare for newly emerging national 

security challenges, and we must do so in an era of fiscal austerity. Partnerships are 

key to NGA’s ability to maintain the capability and the agility required to support our 

multiple mission demands. 

Partnerships help us advance NGA’s vision of “putting the power of GEOINT in your 

hands” by making geospatial data more easily discoverable and usable through online, on-demand access. Our work 

with industry to digitally display aeronautical information on the flight deck of an aircraft is just one example of how 

our partnerships help make that happen. Over the long term, partnerships will allow NGA to continue to explore 

the benefits of crowd-sourced information and forge new ways of using open-source geospatial data, like providing 

support to the volunteer technical community as it responds to natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti.

Partnerships help NGA take full advantage of emerging science and technology, and enhance our ability to discover, 

leverage, adapt and adopt GEOINT-related research and development across the enterprise. Benefits that flow from 

NGA’s partnership arrangements range from advances in basic research to the transfer of novel and near-to-market 

capabilities that allow NGA to maintain a strategic advantage over the nation’s adversaries.

We build partnerships through several pathways, including welcoming innovation from small businesses through 

the Mentor-Protégé Program, encouraging out-of-the-box thinking through the Industry Interaction Program and 

harnessing scientific discovery to hard problems in GEOINT. These programs share a common characteristic: resources 

— including expertise, data, technology and people — flow both ways.

As we progress toward our goal of broadening and deepening analytic expertise to produce new value, partnerships 

increase professional development opportunities on all sides, promoting the sharing of knowledge and best practices in 

analytic tradecraft and bringing fresh perspectives to analysts’ education and training.

Looking to the future, NGA is supporting public-private initiatives that equip and encourage the younger generation 

to pursue geoscience and related careers in the U.S. government where they can bring their skills and talent to the 

mission of supporting this nation’s security interests.

The benefits of our partnerships are wide ranging, and there is a reason for this. When NGA enters a partnership, 

our decision is guided by our long-term goals and objectives as presented in the NGA 2013-17 Strategy (see related 

article on page 4). Through strategic partnerships, we demonstrate that our twin commitments to effective resource 

management and to mission performance are mutually reinforcing and together help us put the power of GEOINT into 

the hands of our users as they work to save lives and support our national security. 

 

2Pathfinder » July/August 2012

ON MY MIND

Letitia A. Long

Director
3Pathfinder » July/August 2012

CONTENTS

2 On My Mind:

Partnerships Prepare NGA for Future National

Security Challenges

» NGA News

4 NGA Director Unveils 2013–17 Strategy

5 CRADAs Enhance NGA’s Aeronautical Data 

Distribution

5 NGA Alumni Association Celebrates 1st Anniversary

» Features

6 Lab Fosters Future GEOINT Experts

8 Mentor-Protégé Program Builds Partnerships

10 CRADAs Enhance Competitiveness

12 NGA Partners With DOE National Labs

14 NEA Provides Virtual Capabilities

17 Industry Interaction Drives Change

18 Disaster Response Efforts Highlight Value of 

Relationships, Nontraditional Partners

» History

21 Our Heritage: Personal Influence Affects Charts, 

Maps, Surveys

DIRECTOR

Letitia A. Long

DEPUTY DIRECTOR

Michael A. Rodrigue

OFFICE OF CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS,

DIRECTOR

William M. Caniano

EDITOR

Susan H. Meisner

GRAPHIC ARTIST

Maurice M. Smith

Published by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

Office of Corporate Communications

Telephone: (571) 557-5400

DSN 547-5400

E-mail: pathfinder@nga.mil

The Pathfinder is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency publication 

that promotes awareness and understanding of geospatial intelligence. The 

Pathfinder is an authorized Department of Defense publication for members of 

the Department of Defense. Contents of this publication are not necessarily the 

official view of, or endorsed by, the U.S. government, Department of Defense 

or NGA. Articles in the Pathfinder may be reproduced in whole or in part 

without permission, unless stated otherwise. If reproduced, credit the author 

and the “National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pathfinder magazine.” 

Any reproduction of graphics, photographs and imagery is subject to the 

original copyright.

On the Cover: Partnerships help NGA advance its vision of “putting the 

power of GEOINT in your hands.” Cover design by Maurice Smith.

6

17

21
4

NGA DIRECTOR UNVEILS 2013–17 STRATEGY

NGA Director Unveils 2013–17 Strategy

By Jay M. Belles and Corry M. Robb, Office of Geospatial Intelligence Management

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director 

Letitia A. Long unveiled the agency’s overarching 

strategy for 2013-2017 May 14, providing direction 

and guidance aimed at increasing efficiency, value and 

integration of the geospatial intelligence discipline during 

the next five years.

Aligning with the strategic priorities outlined in the U.S. 

National Intelligence Strategy, the U.S. Defense Intelligence 

Strategy and the U.S. Secretary of Defense strategic 

guidance titled “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities 

for the 21st Century Defense,” the NGA strategy will help 

propel GEOINT forward as a key enabler of U.S. national 

security interests, actions and decisions around the globe.

“The NGA strategy establishes the strategic goals and 

objectives that will guide our efforts to fulfill NGA’s mission 

and vision,” Long stated in the opening letter of the strategy. 

“In doing so, [we] ensure that NGA continues to lead the 

community in providing relevant, timely and accurate 

geospatial intelligence in support of national security.”

The strategy helps respond to today’s global landscape 

and fiscal environment by demanding better governance 

and deliberate planning to maintain critical GEOINT 

community capabilities while preserving resources for 

future mission development.

To achieve this success, efficiency and integrated 

intelligence through the leveraging of collective resources 

is crucial to meeting mission demands.

“Working together, in the context of a shared GEOINT 

vision, is the only means through which we fulfill our 

mission,” said Long.

The strategy allows the agency agility in its response to the 

ever-changing challenges the GEOINT community faces 

while focusing on the Director of National Intelligence and 

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence priorities of 

counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, cyber, anti-access/

anti-denial and global coverage.

The strategy further implements the NGA vision Long first 

outlined in October 2010 by, incorporating the goals of 

providing online, on-demand access to GEOINT knowledge, 

and broadening and deepening analytic expertise to 

produce new value to anticipate and respond to key 

intelligence questions of the future.

Seven strategic objectives will guide NGA in achieving its 

goals. They are content, customer service, open information 

technology environment, analytic capabilities, workforce, 

workplace and corporate and functional management. 

These objectives are interconnected and interdependent as 

each enhances the effort to achieve a common result.

“The strategy reinforces our belief in the strengths that 

each employee brings to NGA, and in the critical role of 

partnership and collaboration both inside and outside the 

agency,” said Long.

These goals and objectives will help empower the 

NGA workforce to better deliver the next generation 

of GEOINT ensuring the discipline is a key contributor 

to U.S. integrated intelligence operations in support of 

multiple mission areas, including military and intelligence 

operations, intelligence analysis, homeland defense and 

humanitarian and disaster relief.

Putting the Power of GEOINT in Your Hands

Corporate & Functional 

Management

NGA’s governance and business operations 

are streamlined, reflect best practices and 

effectively influence the NSG and Allied 

System for Geospatial Intelligence 

Workforce

NGA has an agile, expert and diverse 

workforce and effective leaders who deliver 

results while collaborating inside NGA and 

with NGA customers and partners worldwide

Workplace

NGA workplaces are modern, optimized, 

technically enabled, environmentally friendly, 

safe, secure and encourage flexibility and 

collaboration to support the mission

Provide Online On-Demand Access to 

Our GEOINT Knowledge

Broaden and Deepen Our Analytic 

Expertise to Produce New Value

NGA Strategy 2013–17

Content

GEOINT data, products and 

knowledge are discoverable, 

accessible, timely and relevant

Open IT 

Environment

GEOINT processing and 

exploitation capabilities 

are rapidly developed and 

exportable for community 

Customer Service

GEOINT content is integrated, 

managed and exposed to all 

GEOINT users on all domains 

using self-, assisted- and 

full-service delivery models

Analytic Capabilities

GEOINT’s value is increased to 

better address key 

intelligence issues
5

NGA NEWS

CRADAs Enhance NGA’s Aeronautical Data Distribution

By Jan Lewis, InnoVision Industry Outreach Office

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s 

InnoVision Cooperative Research and 

Development Agreements team, in partnership 

with the Source Operations and Management 

Directorate’s Aeronautical Navigation 

Office (SF), recently activated five CRADA 

projects. Collectively called, “NGA Digital 

Aeronautical Data in the Flight Deck 

Environment,” the CRADAs have the 

overall objective of satisfying the 

NGA need for digitally displaying 

aeronautical flight information 

publications (terminal procedures, 

charts, supplements etc.) on the 

flight deck. 

“The CRADA partnerships 

will allow SF to focus 

on our mission of 

producing the best possible 

aeronautical products, while allowing 

commercial industry to do what they do 

best, develop software and hardware solutions,” 

said Bruce Farnham, principal investigator for the 

CRADA efforts. “Having multiple CRADAs provides 

consumers of our products multiple choices for 

displaying critical flight data in the flight deck 

environments.” 

Aeronautical analysts and subject matter experts from 

five industry partners will work independently with 

NGA for the next five years. The NGA CRADA partners 

are: JOBEAN, Global NavSource, Borsight, ForeFlight 

and Hilton Software.

“These interactive partnerships could reduce NGA’s 

annual hardcopy print budget by enabling our 

customers to utilize digital versions of our products, 

saving on significant printing and distribution costs,” 

said Rodney Mosquito, InnoVision’s CRADA lead for 

aeronautical CRADAs. 

CRADAs are increasingly important since they require no 

funding from NGA, benefiting CRADA partners and NGA 

by sharing both expertise and non-monetary resources.

NGA Alumni Association Celebrates 1st Anniversary

The Association of Aerospace Charting 

Seniors, located in the West, and the 

National Geospatial Intelligence Alumni 

Association located in the East, merged 

last July to form the National GeospatialIntelligence Alumni Association.

Merged at the suggestion of National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director 

Letitia A. Long, the combined association 

officially began functioning in January 

and has about 500 members in its two 

chapters, East and West. 

A board of directors consisting of two members 

from each chapter governs the group. Initial 

East directors are Al Anderson (chair) and John 

Mendez, while West directors are Jim Boyd and 

Bob Edwards. Under the NGAA constitution, 

the chapters continue to operate much as they 

have, with the board providing a focal point for 

communications with and support of NGA and 

other organizations. 

The chapters, formed in the 1970s, 

bring together former and current 

members and associates of NGA and its 

predecessor organizations for both social 

and NGA support functions. Members 

have provided interviews as part of the 

NGA Oral History Program, nominated 

deserving alumni to the NGA Hall of 

Fame and honored active employees for 

their significant contributions to the NGA 

mission and the honoree’s community.

An NGAA-East member also has 

participated as part of NGA’s Family 

Resource Group. 

NGAA welcomes all current and former 

members of NGA and its predecessor 

agencies. More information on the 

association and its activities, with links 

to the chapters, is at www.ngaalumni.

org. Current and former NGA employees 

may also join the Association of Mapping 

Seniors; their website is at www.

mappers.org.

 A Borsight Electronic Flight Bag product 

displays on a hand-held device.

NGA photo by Marcella Taylor

Pathfinder » July/August 2012
6

Lab Fosters Future GEOINT Experts

To work in the geospatial 

intelligence field in 2015, 

what subjects do you study in 

school? What kind of experience and 

background do you need to snag a great 

job? What advice do you give your son 

or daughter on where to focus his or her 

time and energy? 

“The largest generation of young people 

since the ‘60s is beginning to come of 

age and enter the workforce,” said Dr. 

Ann Carbonell, director of InnoVision’s 

Information Integration Office. “These 

‘echo boomers’ are the offspring and 

demographic echo of their parents, 

the baby boomers. They have grown 

up wired and connected both in their 

homes and schools. For NGA, tapping 

into this tech-savvy segment of the 

population is critical as the agency 

embraces technologies such as mobile 

app (application) development, cloud 

computing architecture, virtual reality, 

social media and 3-D visualization.”

One hands-on opportunity in future 

technologies for these echo boomer 

students is located in Dayton, Ohio, at 

the Air Force Research Lab’s Innovation 

and Collaboration Center Tec^Edge 

Discovery Lab. 

Tec^Edge is a collaboration of the Air 

Force Research Laboratory and the 

not-for-profit Wright Brothers Institute. 

Research Director Dr. Rob Williams 

helped to build Tec^Edge and its 

research component, Discovery Lab, 

into an innovation center designed to 

offer students a technology experience 

and encourage them to become future 

technology leaders. The students range 

from high school juniors through 

doctoral candidates, but the focus is on 

younger students to whom technology 

is already an integral part of who they 

are and how they think. Students are 

competitively selected each spring and 

attend virtual orientation meetings 

with Williams so they are able to hit 

the ground running in June. In 2012 

Williams’ Tec^Edge will support about 

100 students. 

“[At the lab], students gain experience 

tackling challenging problems in 

areas such as robotics, virtual worlds, 

biomedical devices, nano-materials, 

smartphone applications and information 

visualization among others,” said Williams.

“Students are typically organized into 

mentored student teams that tackle 

real-world research projects,” said 

John Prikkel, NGA’s Dayton Geospatial 

Intelligence Advancement Testbed (GIAT) 

site lead. “Mentors meet with students 

for perhaps four hours per week early in 

the program. This is reduced to about 

two hours a week during the summer, 

picking up again toward the end of the 

Pathfinder

summer when final presentations are 

» July/August 2012

due. The summer program lasts 10 weeks 

and the student teams must provide 

two prototype projects by the end of the 

summer. From these students, Williams 

selects the most promising for year– 

round opportunities, thus maintaining a 

constant student presence at Tec^Edge.” 

While the Air Force covers funding for both 

the summer and year-round programs, 

Williams actively seeks additional mentors 

to work with students for both, he said. For 

example, the GIAT placed one contractor 

at Tec^Edge, fundamentally extending 

the Dayton GIAT into the TEC^Edge, 

working on mobile app development and 

supporting NGA’s Readiness, Response 

and Recovery Integrated Work Group 

(IWG-R3) Strategic Initiative. 

Working with two Wright State 

University students, Michael Duncan 

and James West, GIAT contractor Shane 

Lab Fosters Future GEOINT Experts

By Marianne V. Kramer, Geospatial Intelligence Advancement Testbed chief of staff, and John Prikkel, 

Dayton Geospatial Intelligence Advancement Testbed site lead, InnoVision Directorate

Students in the 20012 Tec^Edge Discovery Lab program disassembled Innovation First Labs, Inc. HEXBUG®, motorized insects. Here student Megan Kramer welds rotors onto her HEXBUG to make it fly. 

NGA photo by Marianne V. Kramer
7

Lab Fosters Future GEOINT Experts

King leveraged students to help solve 

a map tiling issue for mobile devices 

that first responders can use to support 

disaster response apps in areas where 

connectivity is limited, said King. He 

briefed the capability at the second 

InnoVision Mobile Apps Summit in 

February and received significant interest 

and stimulated follow-up. 

The TEC^Edge students improve their 

technical skills and their ability to 

work against real-world deadlines and 

responsibilities and work with mentors 

in the government for whom they may 

eventually end up working, said Williams. 

This experience is invaluable for both the 

students and NGA.

InnoVision may place a second contractor 

at Tec^Edge Discovery Lab, said Williams. 

He met recently with Ben Tuttle, the 

GIAT Mobile Apps Team lead, to discuss Pathfinder » July/August 2012

furthering the partnership and increasing 

mentoring activities. With the large number 

of unclassified mobile app requests already 

needed for the IWG-R3, Tec^Edge and the 

NGA partnership provide opportunities and 

experiences for students that could benefit 

the government in the near term and into 

the future. 

Tec^Edge Discovery Lab started with a 

handful of students several years ago and has 

grown to 100 this summer. Williams would like 

to network his local discovery lab with other 

labs and virtually engage 1,000 students, he 

said. An expanded arrangement such as with 

NGA would let involvement and mentoring 

like this multiply in other geographic 

locations. Organizations interested in working 

with the lab should contact Williams at robert.

williams@wpafb.af.mil. More information is 

available at the following link: http://wbi-icc.

com/centers-services/discovery-lab.

NGA photo by Marianne V. Kramer

Michael Duncan, a student and team lead in the Tec^Edge Discovery Lab, interacts with a humanoid Aldebaran Robotics NAO robot. The students developed mobile device software 

to control the robot. Potential uses might be field reconnaissance or roadside bomb detection.

The Summer at the Edge scholar intern 

program hosted its 3rd annual Open House 

in August. The event was the culmination of 10 weeks of intense research and 

exploration conducted by over 80 students. 

Teams comprised of high school to doctoral 

students presented over 20 posters outlining 

their work in areas including robotics, virtual 

world exploration and smartphone programming/exploitation.

Photo courtesy 

of the Air Force 

Research 

Laboratory and 

Wright Brothers 

Institute 
8

Mentor-Protégé Program Builds Partnerships

NGA’s Mentor-Protégé Program has produced many 

success stories highlighting the technology transfer 

component, in which a mentor helps enhance or modify 

a protégé’s product or service so it can support NGA 

and/or other intelligence community missions. The 

technology transfer component helps build strong prime 

and subcontractor small businesses. In January the Army 

selected NGA protégé MicroTechnologies as one of four 

awardees for the Private Cloud Mobile IDIQ contract, while 

Air Combat Command awarded them a prime contract for 

the development and implementation of the Installation 

Geospatial Information and Services program for Central, 

Southern and African Commands. 

MicroTech is a service-disabled veteran-owned small 

business. Along with cloud computing, they provide 

technology services, systems integration, product solutions 

and unified communications and collaboration. MicroTech 

and Northrop Grumman participate in a mentor-protégé 

agreement that began in 2010.

 “The success of the mentor protégé program is a direct 

result of the NGA Small Business Office dedication to NGA’s 

mission,” said Matthew Markley, Operations and Training 

Division director for three-time mentor CTSC, LLC. CTSC 

mentored Data Management Group in 2007, Stargates, 

Inc., in 2009 and entered into a third agreement in 2011 

with Global Consulting International (GCI). “Everyone 

benefits from their (NGA’s) leadership and commitment 

to excellence,” said Markley. 

The Air Force recently selected GCI, a small, disadvantaged 

business, as a prime contractor on the $1.9 billion Design 

and Engineering Support Program contract. GCI’s focus 

is on providing engineering services to improve system 

lifecycle cost, operational life, performance, sustainment, 

safety and environmental friendliness.

DOD recognizes mentors and protégés who achieve 

excellence in the execution of their agreements with 

the Mentor-Protégé Nunn Perry Award. The award 

acknowledges the protégé’s growth and development 

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency 

awarded a record 18 mentor-protégé agreements in 

2011, a testament to building partnerships and the 

unprecedented growth and success of the program since 

NGA began participating,” said Small Business Programs 

Office (SBPO) Director Sandra Broadnax.

The Department of Defense established the MentorProtégé Program in 1990 to provide major DOD prime 

contractors incentives to those serving as mentors and 

developing technical and business capabilities in small, 

disadvantaged, women-owned, service-disabled, veteranowned, and historically underutilized business zone small 

businesses, their protégés. The protégé’s incentive is 

increased participation as subcontractors and suppliers 

under DOD contracts as well as long-term business 

relationships with major DOD contractors.

NGA seeks innovative and unique mentor-protégé 

agreements that focus on industry support of GEOINT, 

visualization, tasking, processing, exploitation and 

dissemination, persistent surveillance, timeline 

compression, horizontal integration, forward deployment, 

multi-intelligence and all forms of imagery in the 

electromagnetic spectrum. 

The award process begins with a request for proposal 

for a stand-alone indefinite delivery indefinite quantity 

contract, which provides an indefinite amount, within 

stated limits, of supplies or services during a fixed period. 

Those interested describe their mentor-protégé approach 

in an executive summary and submit an overview of their 

proposed activities, cost estimates and anticipated benefits. 

In conjunction with the Office of the Under Secretary of 

Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, the NGA 

small business office analyzes the submission. If approved 

the office determines the government’s objective based on 

the mentor’s proposal, the Defense Contract Audit Agency 

conducts an audit/rate check to validate the mentor’s 

accounting system and NGA negotiates labor, work hours, 

cost and milestones. Awards can range from one to three 

years with extensions possible. 

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

Mentor-Protégé Program 

Builds Partnerships

By Margo Gasquet, Staff Officer, Small Business Programs Office

“
9

Mentor-Protégé Program Builds Partnerships

along with the mentor’s performance in technical assistance. 

DOD selected two NGA mentor-protégé teams, IBM 

Corporation and Foxhole Technology Inc., and SAIC and Vector 

Planning and Services, Inc., as winners in 2011, and Computer 

Science Corporation and NVision Solutions, Inc., in 2010. 

CSC paired with NVision, a small, disadvantaged business 

program participant and women-owned company, to provide 

guidance and direction under the program. 

“We recognize the tremendous effort put forth by NVision 

over the years and the knowledge they bring to bear,” said 

Bong Gumahad, vice president of CSC’s national intelligence 

operations. “They continually exemplified the dedication and 

professionalism we seek in all protégé companies and we are 

excited about our future endeavors as a team.” 

NVision is a subcontractor on NGA’s Global Geospatial 

Intelligence contract, providing geographic information 

services that support warfighter needs. Specifically, NVision 

provides the warfighter feature extraction for mapping 

systems (mapping intelligence) and two-dimensional and 3-D 

image extraction that helps warfighters maneuver in theater. 

“Our work to support NGA’s challenging mission has pushed 

us to be innovative with the technology we create and use as 

well as how we manage and run our business,” said NVision 

President Socorro Harvey. “We look forward to a continued 

relationship with both NGA and our mentor CSC.”

The key to the success stories is the technology transfer, said 

Broadnax. The commitment between the mentor and protégé to 

develop and/or enhance products or information to strengthen the 

intelligence community, to process GEOINT in a flash, and to protect 

national security is immeasurable but critical to the warfighter. 

Identifying the technology transfer is a requirement in the 

executive agreement and transfers range from information 

assurance and cyber security to remote sensing and GIS 

solutions and support, just to name a few. Along with 

the mentor and protégé, DOD and NGA also benefit from 

technology transfers such as HP Enterprise Services providing 

a dedicated lab for their protégé Emagine IT in one of NGA’s 

2011 agreements. The lab provides proof of concepts, 

demonstrations, application/database testing and development 

to NGA for existing, new and emerging technologies resulting 

in efficiencies, cost savings and better informed decisions 

on GEOINT analysis of imagery and geospatial data and 

information. The protégé and mentor gain an increased 

understanding of NGA’s business area architecture and NGA 

gains from two companies in a partnership providing expertise 

and knowledge and winners all around.

The NGA Small Business Programs Office continues to build 

partnerships by encouraging approved mentors to develop and 

enhance the capabilities of protégés. Potential mentors and 

protégés can meet up on NGA’s website at https://www1.nga.

mil/Partners/Pages/MentorProtege.aspx.

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

NVision has provided 3-D feature extraction services 

to NGA since 2006 using custom software and hardware they developed. The Mentor-Protégé program 

was a tremendous catalyst for NVision’s growth and 

infrastructure development.

NVision photo by Joel Herr
10

CRADAs Enhance Competitiveness

What is a Cooperative 

Research and Development 

Agreement? A CRADA is a 

formal agreement with an industry or 

academic partner to bring innovative 

solutions to National GeospatialIntelligence Agency’s most complex 

research and development problems. 

NGA and the partner contribute 

expertise, data and/or technology to 

the CRADA effort, and both partners 

benefit from the collaboration.

InnoVision’s Industry Outreach 

Division manages the NGA CRADA 

program, as well as NGA’s partnership 

with In-Q-Tel and the Small Business 

Innovation Research program. 

“The three programs offer diverse 

partnership opportunities for industry 

and academia to work with NGA,” said 

Paul Nagele, deputy division chief. 

Congress passed legislation under the 

Federal Technology Transfer Act of 1986 

(P.L. 99-502) that introduced CRADAs as a 

mechanism to increase federal laboratories’ 

interaction with industry. The ultimate 

goal of the legislation was to enhance 

U.S. competitiveness by encouraging the 

transfer of technology between the U.S. 

government and the private sector. 

NGA’s CRADA projects range widely across 

NGA’s mission areas, including everything 

from geospatial education to improving 

business processes to scientific research 

into emerging phenomenologies. Current 

research areas include: image exploitation, 

geospatial technologies, geospatial 

training, object-oriented technologies, 

multi-intelligence and/or multi-source 

processing and exploitation, advanced 

sensor research and development 

and enhancements to both electronic 

navigation technology and aeronautical 

data holdings.

CRADA projects involving Light Detection 

and Ranging (LIDAR) technology are an 

example of successful technology transfer 

and mutual cooperation between NGA 

and industry partners. 

LIDAR, an optical remote sensing technology, 

is relatively new to NGA. Laser pulses bounce 

off objects to detect their properties and 

can measure distances to them, outline their 

shape and determine other object properties 

by illuminating a target with light. 

NGA is working with CRADA partners 

Applied Imagery, Exelis Visual Information 

Solutions and Overwatch, leveraging their 

CRADAs to make several NGA-developed 

LIDAR tools available to the National 

System for Geospatial Intelligence, which 

includes intelligence community, joint 

Michael O’Brien, NGA’s CRADA Program Director, Laura Jennings, Deputy Chief, Acquisition and Intellectual 

Property Law, Office of General Counsel, and Bertram Beaulieu, Director, InnoVision, celebrate NGA’s milestone 

achievement of 25 active Cooperative Research and Development Agreements at an April 19 ceremony at NGA 

headquarters in Springfield, Va. 

NGA photo by Larry Franklin

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

“A significant difference between 

the programs is that CRADAs do 

not involve traditional contractual 

relationships; in fact, NGA is 

prohibited from contributing funds to 

a CRADA partner.” 

Why would a commercial 

enterprise, university or research 

lab agree to work with NGA without 

receiving funds? Partners can 

benefit from access to governmentdeveloped algorithms and scientific 

research and gain insights into NGA 

challenges through their side-byside work with NGA employees. 

This interaction may enable 

collaborators to create a better 

geospatial production tool, sensor 

and/or database, which they can 

then make commercially available 

to their customers. 

CRADAs Enhance Competitiveness

By Jan Lewis, Project Scientist, and Jim Vrabel, Contractor, InnoVision Industry Outreach Office 
11

CRADAs Enhance Competitiveness

staff, military departments, services and combatant commands, to 

advance understanding of this technology. 

NGA transferred government Tactical Decision Aid algorithms, 

which help analysts and users of geospatial tactical information, to 

these CRADA partners. The partners in turn agreed to incorporate 

the algorithms into their commercial-off-the-shelf analysis tools 

and provide operations and maintenance support for them. 

Transferred TDAs include helicopter landing zone algorithms 

designed to help identify acceptable helicopter landing locations 

and line-of-sight algorithms used for 3-D LIDAR analysis of a 

location’s tactical environment.

CRADA partnership agreements are increasingly important to NGA’s 

research and development efforts because they allow exploration 

of cutting-edge technology that might not otherwise be possible in 

an era of tightening federal budgets. NGA’s CRADA program reached 

the significant milestone of 25 active CRADAs in March, with several 

others in development. 

“While the InnoVision CRADA team manages the CRADA program 

for NGA, personnel from many directorates are essential to program 

success, serving as principal investigators and subject matter 

experts,” said Michael O’Brien, NGA CRADA program director. 

Have a new CRADA idea? NGA is interested in establishing 

additional CRADAs with industry and academia that are consistent 

with the NGA mission and amenable to industry, academic and/

or other participation and exchange. Contact the CRADA team at 

crada@nga.mil for more information or to suggest a CRADA.

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

NGA InnoVision graphic by Melissa Gray

TonisPan–Fotolia image
12

NGA Partners With DOE Nat’l Labs

Oak Ridge, Hanford, Los Alamos — in historical 

memory and popular imagination, Americans 

associate these places with the Manhattan Project, 

the Cold War and peaceful uses of atomic energy. What 

may be less well-known is that during the past six decades, 

these and other Department of Energy national laboratories 

have quietly and steadily built a research and development 

enterprise that seeks to tackle national-level challenges 

including: sustaining energy resources; managing climate 

change; reducing dangers to human health; promoting 

domestic and global economic growth; protecting 

America’s deployed warfighters; combating terrorism and 

the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; and 

mitigating conflict within and between nations.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has been a 

consistent contributor to and benefactor of the National 

Laboratories’ successes. NGA — including its legacy 

organizations such as the Defense Mapping Agency 

and the National Photographic Interpretation Center 

— has a long history of working with DOE laboratories. 

Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, 

Pacific Northwest and Sandia National Laboratories 

have all delivered new capabilities to the geospatial 

intelligence — or GEOINT — community. These 

capabilities include high performance computing, 

data visualization, signal processing and energy, 

transportation and population modeling. 

NGA’s InnoVision Directorate leads the Agency’s 

engagement with the national laboratories, advancing its 

mission to perform path-breaking scientific research while 

transitioning to innovative concepts and capabilities that 

solve the intelligence community’s and warfighters’ most 

complex and enduring problems. “The labs are an amazing 

national resource with unique facilities, computing power 

and multi-disciplinary scientific expertise focused on a host 

of pressing national intelligence questions,” said InnoVision 

Director Bert Beaulieu. 

The relationship between NGA and the Oak Ridge 

National Laboratory (ORNL) is an example of InnoVision’s 

partnering approach. “We are nurturing a natural 

partnership that comes from shared values and shared 

vision,” said Beaulieu. 

ORNL’s John Doesburg, Director of International Security 

and Analysis Programs, echoed the point. The scientists 

working at NGA and ORNL “share a culture of life-long 

learning and service to the nation, focused on what’s 

possible, not just what’s doable” said Doesburg. “Having 

NGA as a partner allows us to push the frontiers of science 

and to realize our vision of conducting basic science 

research to solve grand challenges in global security.” 

ORNL is widely recognized for its commitment to research 

and development in geographic information science 

and technology. Dr. Budhu Bhaduri leads the Geographic 

Information Science and Technology Group, a GIS science 

and technology research and development group aligned 

with ORNL’s computing and computational science 

directorate. “Where we sit within ORNL uniquely positions 

us to take advantage of emerging capabilities in high 

performance computing, computational science and data 

sciences and engineering,” said Bhaduri. 

In practical terms, Bhaduri and his team used this 

synergy to develop LandScan Global, LandScan USA 

and a settlement mapper tool, each of which allows 

analysts to rapidly capture and manipulate socio-cultural 

and socio-economic data about a populated area from 

high resolution imagery. According to Bhaduri, these 

geographic data integration and analysis projects 

generate the finest population distribution data available. 

This highly specific information is of great use not only 

to support current national security missions but also to 

creating models that forecast migrations and populations 

at risk from disasters, climate change, political unrest and 

other stressors. The focus is on how activities of people 

alter places, and vice versa. Toward that goal, LandScan 

Global and LandScan USA are meeting the challenge 

of developing “landscapes of people, day and night.” 

Partnering with the national laboratories on research 

projects has yielded major returns on NGA’s investment. For 

example, NGA’s domestic deployers and mission partners 

such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency 

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

NGA Partners With DOE Nat’l Labs

By M. Karen Walker, Contractor, Office of Corporate Communications
13

NGA Partners With DOE Nat’l Labs

depend on the national laboratories’ models of how critical 

infrastructure and population centers interconnect. These 

models show how a failure in one part of the energy grid 

might “chain out” to communities not directly impacted. This 

awareness not only speeds relief to those most vulnerable, 

but also improves disaster planning and guides the prepositioning of disaster response resources, a point reinforced 

by Steve Alness, Acting Chief of Applications and Content 

Technology for the Integrated Work Group on Readiness, 

Response and Recovery. “ORNL’s unique expertise in 

population, energy, transportation and climate modeling 

gives us a depth of understanding to effectively plan and 

carry out disaster relief efforts around the globe,” Alness said.

NGA’s focused work with the national laboratories exemplifies 

a partnering strategy to support and leverage centers of 

excellence on specific capabilities. Connecting centers of 

excellence to each other, and to members of the National 

System for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG) and Allied System for 

Geospatial Intelligence (ASG), advances InnoVision’s crosscommunity functional management role. The NSG represents 

the nation’s integrated GEOINT enterprise, encompassing 

technology, policy, capabilities, and producers and users 

of GEOINT in the U.S. government, industry, academia and 

non-governmental sectors. The ASG represents the geospatial 

intelligence relationships among the “five eyes” community of 

Commonwealth nations: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the 

United Kingdom and the United States.

The GEOINT Research and Development Functional 

Management Executive, Becky Aiken, described this role 

using the analogy of a heat map. “We can see where there’s a 

lot of work happening, and we can make that evident to NSG 

and ASG members,” said Aiken. “We can also see where work 

is cooling. This could mean that a hoped-for break through 

didn’t happen, so we need to move in a new direction, or it 

could mean that researchers need more resources to keep the 

fire going.” Efficiencies arise from collective decisions on how to 

prioritize resources in new and novel approaches to global and 

human security, said Aiken. 

The heat map analogy works because the national laboratories 

have become more interdependent. Doesburg underscored 

that the system is only as robust as the people within it, 

adding, “We’ve evolved from a system of national labs to a 

national laboratory system.” 

InnoVision builds relationships not only at the organizational 

level, but also among individual researchers and analysts. NGA 

researchers working inside national laboratories are gaining 

insights and creating tighter collaborations for state-of-theart GEOINT. One of these is Dr. Brigitte Brunelle, a project 

scientist in InnoVision’s Basic and Applied Research Office 

who is currently conducting counter-proliferation research at 

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as part of a Director 

of National Intelligence Exceptional Analyst Fellowship. “In 

addition to having access to state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, 

the opportunity to engage with LANL research scientists on 

a regular basis has enabled me to carry out this research in a 

scientifically rigorous and efficient manner,” Brunelle said. The 

opportunity to build an extensive circle of cleared scientific 

colleagues, and to learn more about the DOE national laboratory 

system in general, will foster more robust and well-executed 

collaborations in the future, predicted Brunelle. 

Over the long term, NGA’s partnering strategy will continue to 

integrate NSG and ASG research with DOE’s national laboratory 

activities, adding to a growing base of fundamental knowledge 

that is diverse, dynamic and data-driven. As summarized 

by Aiken, “strengthening this current research partnership 

with the national laboratories has become more important 

than ever as NGA and its NSG partners strive to efficiently 

focus increasingly precious R&D (research and development) 

resources on the nation’s critical intelligence problems.”

Daytime

NighttimeCourtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

These two graphics, produced with LandScan USA, a high-resolution geospatial and temporal modeling approach for population distribution and dynamics, compare and contrast 

the daytime and nighttime activity in San Francisco; the spires represent population density. 
14

NEA Provides Virtual Capabilities

NEA Provides Virtual Capabilities

By Keith L. Barber, Director, National System for Geospatial Intelligence Expeditionary Architecture Integrated Program Office

High-Performance Computing Creates 

a Global Architecture

Warfighters and decision makers cannot wait days for data, 

so the National System for Geospatial-Intelligence (NSG) 

Expeditionary Architecture (NEA) Integrated Program 

Office (IPO) is providing new technology and architecture 

solutions to ensure timely access, discovery and retrieval of 

GEOINT now. 

“We need the enabling technologies to make all this 

happen, from cloud computing and mobile GEOINT to 

application development and management,” said National 

Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Director Letitia A. Long at a 

recent employee forum. “Achieving efficiencies and taking 

advantage of technology innovations are critical to our 

ability to realize our vision,” she added. 

NEA will employ commercial and open-source cloud 

computing technologies to expand upon benefits the 

commercial community is already seeing from virtualization 

and high-performance computing (HPC). A highly virtualized, 

scalable environment adapts to growing needs and can 

benefit the entire GEOINT user community. It brings 

existing data and services to a wider audience, enables 

the development of advanced analytical services, and 

greatly reduces the cost of developing and deploying new 

capabilities and maintaining current hardware and software. 

GEOINT HPC and NEA

NEA’s GEOINT HPC vision includes supporting the 

warfighter through a distributed set of physical and 

virtualized compute, storage, network and data 

infrastructure resources. Essentially, HPC implements 

parallel or distributed processing, which splits a task 

into chunks several different entities can work on 

simultaneously. While the processing, or compute resources 

are distributed across many physical locations they 

remain accessible from any part of the architecture. Nearly 

unlimited amounts of processing power can be available to 

work a task, which can be completed much more quickly 

than if a single entity processed it as a single task. The NEA 

IPO will design other resources, such as storage, network 

and data infrastructure, to work together to manage and 

execute the processing tasks using HPC. 

HPC is highly applicable to GEOINT processing since its 

data sets are often far larger than with other, non-GEOINT 

text-based data. When coupled with other benefits of 

cloud architecture, such as resource scaling and dynamic 

allocation, HPC can greatly reduce timelines for delivery 

of GEOINT into the hands of the user while enhancing 

processing performance and enabling advanced analysis 

that was previously unattainable. 

For example, a user may need light detection and ranging 

(LIDAR) data, which uses pulses of laser light to generate 

3-D images, over a specific area. Today, that user could 

wait for extended periods of time for a source to acquire, 

process and provide the data. Many processing steps 

may be required before an analyst can use the data, 

such as segregating the data of interest and applying 

geographic coordinates. In a Hadoop cluster (or other 

parallel/distributed processing HPC configuration), the 

source can split the LIDAR processing amongst multiple 

servers that work simultaneously, significantly reducing 

the time the user must wait for delivery of the processed 

data. Distribution of parallel data and compute power like 

with Hadoop, combined with specific image processing 

and analytics accelerators delivered as part of the NSG 

GEOINT HPC environment, will enable this. Examples of 

these technologies include graphic processing units, which 

are specialized, efficient electronic circuits that can rapidly 

process images displayed on a user’s workstation monitor, 

mobile phone screen or other display device, and fieldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs). FPGAs are integrated 

circuits used in nearly any type of open-standard hardware 

configuration; users can re-program them on the fly to work 

with different applications. 

The NEA cloud framework changes the set-up from 

stovepiped and limited access to globally accessible and 

usable. As new analyst needs emerge and the warfighter 

Pathfinder » July/August 2012
15

NEA Provides Virtual Capabilities

mission evolves, the framework will facilitate the rapid 

development and deployment of additional capabilities in a 

services-based, virtualized environment with quicker access 

to data and resources across the cloud. 

A key aspect of the framework is the automated scaling of 

compute resources to support virtualized environments 

that are distributed horizontally across the enterprise, 

better enabling capabilities such as advanced analytics. The 

value of parallel/distributed computing is further enhanced 

with automated scaling. Available compute processing 

will ‘scale up’ if there’s a greater demand from the user and 

‘scale down’ when the demand no longer exists. During 

these downtimes the resources may work lower priority 

standing tasks, such as non-time sensitive data processing. 

Users can share and use computing power anywhere in the 

cloud, which gives each user access to greater processing 

resources and greater performance than they would have 

with one computer at one desk. HPC automated scaling 

further decreases processing timelines for time-sensitive 

analysis that would otherwise be limited to the compute 

power of an analyst’s physical workstation.

Enabling Remote Exploitation

New sensors continue to increase the volume and velocity 

of GEOINT data available to National System for Geospatial 

Intelligence partners. NEA aims to reduce the amount of 

data moving around just for processing purposes, with a 

goal of processing data in place whenever possible. HPC 

nodes will deliver a new virtualized (VPoP) model that 

supports remote connections. These remote sessions, 

combined with intelligence community, Department of 

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

 Achieving efficiencies and 

taking advantage 

of technology 

innovations are 

critical to our ability 

to realize our vision, 

said NGA Director 

Letitia A. Long.

Petty Officer 1st Class Cory Christman prepares 

weather briefs for pilots at the Naval Aviation 

Forecast Center at Naval Station Norfolk. 

Navy photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class William 

Weinert

“

”
16

NEA Provides Virtual Capabilities

Defense and other GEOINT service-based applications, 

provide remote processing and exploitation without 

moving the data. 

Remote exploitation, combined with HPC processing, will 

be critical for advanced exploitation capabilities such as 

activity based intelligence (ABI). Effective ABI involves 

layering multiple sources of data and then applying 

mathematical solutions or automated algorithms to them 

to flag which activities might warrant further investigation 

by an analyst. ABI will be available as a service on remote 

servers so those with access can use their tools to analyze 

data at rest and download or disseminate only the finished 

ABI products they need. NGA will update and modernize 

these virtualized services as new versions become available, 

making them immediately available to the entire GEOINT 

community. ABI is poised to save thousands of hours 

of analysts’ time while making discoveries that might 

otherwise go unknown. Some ABI capabilities are already 

available in theater.

The Bigger Picture: Moving to Global Enterprise 

HPCHPC is just one of many key components to an 

on-demand, user-focused, cloud-based architecture. 

Though HPC can be allocated on-demand by a user, HPC 

does provide compute resources at many levels of the 

architecture. It provides compute power to run platforms 

(such as development platforms, virtual desktop operating 

systems, etc.) and software (especially fully featured, rich 

client desktop applications) as well as data (primarily for 

data ingest, processing and automated analysis). This 

approach offers a drop-in anywhere set of information 

technology capacities, termed NEA global nodes, with 

built-in infrastructure services that unify those nodes into 

the larger continental and outside the continental U.S. 

information technology enterprises. 

Analysts can now process GEOINT datasets such as fullmotion video, wide area motion imagery, LIDAR and 

hyperspectral imagery directly from ingested sensor 

platforms and use tools such as NSG Video Services, Google 

Visualization Services and the Full Spectrum Tool Kit served 

by the HPC platform to exploit them.

Interoperability is key to the successful implementation of 

cloud-based architecture. New standards and procedures 

must address how technology behaves rather than 

just describing it. A cloud-based environment is a vast 

ecosystem of components that must be interoperable, and 

the approaches to designing within this ecosystem differ 

from traditional methods. This shift in design patterns must 

keep and facilitate interoperability between mission partner 

systems while sustaining a coherent, mission-based global 

GEOINT service-model for the NSG.

Resource Management

The NEA cloud framework introduces a GEOINT-specific 

concept of cloud resource management called the Global 

Resource Manager (GRM). The GRM is not a set of systems 

administrators or data managers, but rather a set of services 

that manage data within the architecture. For example, the 

GRM will direct the parallel/distributed compute power, 

as it allocates all resources across the cloud, on-demand 

and in support of the mission. This provides robust, shared 

and reusable services enforced through open IT standards. 

Users across the IC and DOD can access a community of 

applications, services, data and derived products without 

affecting or altering them.

The GEOINT HPC platform provides scalable, elastic, 

distributed and responsive virtualized services to users. 

Users will have faster access to GEOINT, virtual access to 

the latest services and exploitation tools, and a framework 

that provides the infrastructure to support the best mission 

performance possible. This enables users to quickly share and 

act on GEOINT. 

Looking Forward

The NEA cloud framework changes the set-up from 

stovepiped and limited access to globally accessible and 

usable. As new analyst needs emerge and the warfighter 

mission evolves, the framework will facilitate the rapid 

development and deployment of additional capabilities in a 

services-based, virtualized environment with quicker access 

to data and resources across the cloud. 

NSG users and organizations will take advantage of 

access to content, as well as self-service GEOINT tools 

and applications to meet time-critical mission objectives. 

In addition, NGA will gain efficiencies for deployed 

environments (e.g. reduced overseas footprint and other 

cost savings). HPC is an initial step towards implementing 

this vision for NEA users — giving NGA’s tactical users an 

additional needed edge.

Pathfinder » July/August 2012
17

Industry Interaction Drives Change

Industry Interaction Drives Change

By Karen I. Palmer, Industry Interaction Program Manager

NGA and Industry

Neither the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency nor the 

intelligence community as a whole can perform its mission on 

its own. NGA’s industry partners offer ground-breaking thought, 

pioneering research and in-depth technological expertise to NGA’s 

business operations and production methods. They help NGA 

build the revolutionary capabilities the agency needs to remain 

the premier GEOINT provider.

NGA’s mission partners include a wide array of decision 

makers and operational forces. Their interests include 

protecting national security, combating the threat of terrorism, 

implementing national policy, responding to natural disasters 

and countering illegal drug trafficking. To be successful, they 

require geospatial intelligence foundation data, information and 

services — tailored to meet highly specific needs and delivered 

quickly and in an easily understood format.

NGA has promoted teamwork between and among government 

and industry while keeping in mind that NGA has a fiduciary and 

contractual oversight responsibility to ensure contractors meet 

contract specifications.

Industry Interaction

“In 2003 James R. Clapper Jr., then director of the National 

Imagery and Mapping Agency (NGA’s predecessor agency) and 

currently the Director of National Intelligence, implemented 

the Industry Interaction Program (IIP) based on his industry 

experience,” said Tonya M. Crawford, director, contracting 

and NGA’s current senior procurement executive. “Director 

Clapper worked with then-NGA Senior Procurement 

Executive Sharon Parish to provide companies equitable 

access to submit ideas and capability statements. IIP has 

built invaluable relationships between our industry partners 

and NGA, and plays a critical part in facilitating NGA’s 

interaction with industry and in helping NGA with agile 

acquisition practices.”

IIP serves as the central point of contact for industry to 

interact with NGA. It ties together, in one office, all industryinteraction activities not otherwise solicited through the 

normal procurement process. The program provides a forum 

for companies to submit ideas, capability statements, white 

papers and unsolicited proposals knowing they will receive 

an NGA response to each one. In addition, NGA coordinates 

all industry executive visits through this process.

In 2005 IIP established a database for information storage 

and recall for solutions and providers for new requirements. 

Currently, 2,646 vendors and over 18,800 documents 

that pertain to industry submissions and visits are in the 

database.

The IIP executive panel includes the director of the small 

business programs office as well as senior technical 

representatives from across NGA. They carefully review 

company submissions and provide a written status back to 

the company within a two-week period.

Between Feb. 1, 2004, and March 31, 2012, IIP received 913 

submissions; some companies submitted more than one. 

The panel forwarded 67 percent of the submissions for 

further technical evaluation. Some companies have gone 

on to participate in cooperative research and development 

agreements (see related story on p. 10) and some have been 

awarded subcontracts in partnership with prime contractors. 

NGA has awarded 18 contracts using this process and has six 

additional potential contract actions for fiscal year 2012. 

NGA encourages companies interested in supporting NGA’s 

vision and mission to participate in the IIP process. For more 

information on IIP, visit www.nga.mil and click on “Partners” 

or contact Karen I. Palmer, Program Manager for Industry 

Interaction; Rochelle Edwards, Project Manager for Industry 

Interaction; or Crystal Branson, Special Assistant for Industry 

Interaction at 571-557-6748 or email industry@nga.mil.

The U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation GEOINT Symposium provides an annual 

opportunity for NGA’s Industry Interaction Program representatives to meet with 

industry partners. The NGA booth at last year’s symposium, held Oct. 16-19 at the 

Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center in San Antonio, served as a focal point for those 

engagements. This year’s symposium will be Oct. 8-11 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and 

Convention Center in Orlando, Fla.

NGA photo by Rob Cox

Pathfinder » July/August 2012
18

Disaster Response Efforts Highlight Value of Relationships, Nontraditional Partners

The nation’s response to the 

January 2010 earthquake 

in Haiti demonstrated 

the life-saving power of 

governmental, private-sector and 

nongovernmental organizations 

working hand-in-hand during 

disaster response. Thanks to an 

emerging group of organizations 

loosely called Volunteer Technical 

Communities (VTCs) — like 

the International Network of 

Crisis Mappers, OpenStreetMap, 

the Global Earth Observation 

Catastrophe Assessment Network 

(GEOCAN), Google Map Maker, 

Ushahidi and CrisisCommons, 

among others — relief workers and 

international aid coordinators had 

access to a wealth of geospatial 

information to help them manage 

the response. 

The VTCs’ response to Haiti 

expanded efforts by the National 

Haiti response with a “complete transformation in how 

we use geospatial information for crisis response.” 

Contrasting the Haiti effort with the response to the 

2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Crowley conveyed the 

frustration of relief workers in Aceh, Indonesia, who 

had difficulty determining where to find internally 

displaced people (IDP) without imagery depicting their 

camp fires and temporary structures. In Haiti, however, 

imagery was widely available under attribution-only 

licensing from commercial imagery providers GeoEye 

and DigitalGlobe. The open license on imagery had 

a secondary effect: OpenStreetMap was able to 

build a map of Haiti’s critical roads, infrastructure 

and emerging IDP camps within about 2 1/2 weeks, 

with 640 mappers contributing over 1.4 million edits, 

reported Crowley. 

NGA’s Katie Baucom, a geospatial intelligence analyst 

supporting NGA’s Integrated Work Group for Readiness, 

Response and Recovery (IWG-R3), predicted that 

the Haiti response will be a long-lasting highlight 

in public-private cooperation. “The reservoir of 

geospatial information produced by and for local and 

international communities changed from unknown to 

extraordinarily detailed features in the blink of an eye,” 

Baucom said. VTCs captured indigenous knowledge 

about places and people, including names for roads, 

landmarks and community gathering spots, Baucom 

added. This volunteer-led digitization effort made it 

easier for relief workers to cross-reference geospatial 

information with text messaging alerts and social 

media reporting to identify areas and people in need of 

aid, said Baucom.

The Haiti earthquake response offers a number of 

positive lessons for government officials seeking to build 

trust and teaming relationships with non traditional 

partners. Crowley emphasized four elements in 

particular: building momentum for a broad-based and 

strategic public-private partnership independent of a 

crisis response; solidifying collegial relationships before a 

crisis response; creating a neutral space in which to test 

the mechanisms for collaboration; and defining roles to 

provide consistency and a common frame of reference 

to guide future endeavors.

NGA, National Defense University, U.S. Geological Survey, State Department and U.S. Agency for 

International Development representatives piloted technical interoperability and data flow between 

lead federal agencies and the Volunteer Technical Community in an international and domestic disaster response, part of the August 2011 Research and Experimentation for Local and International 

Emergency First Responders — RELIEF — experimentation event at Camp Roberts, Calif. 

Photo courtesy of the Naval Postgraduate School

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency’s crisis action team to 

provide situational awareness 

and complemented NGA’s 

holistic approach to disaster 

response. The VTCs produced 

geospatial information 

products immediately useful 

to relief workers, allowing 

NGA’s team to focus on 

deeper and more specialized 

analyses for environmental 

and critical infrastructure 

assessments and forecasting 

population movements.

John Crowley, a researcher 

with the Harvard Humanitarian 

Initiative and National Defense 

University’s Transformative 

Innovation for Development 

and Emergency Support 

program, helped marshal 

resources following the Haiti 

earthquake and credits the 

Disaster Response Efforts Highlight Value 

of Relationships, Nontraditional Partners

By M. Karen Walker, Contractor, Office of Corporate Communications
19

Disaster Response Efforts Highlight Value of Relationships, Nontraditional Partners

Building Momentum 

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency 

sponsored one of the early catalysts for connecting global 

communications technologies, geospatial information and 

disaster response, a project called Strong Angel. Originally 

to train Marines for humanitarian operations like they do for 

combat, Strong Angel experiments in 2000, 2004 and 2006 

created a neutral space between academia, government, 

United Nations’ agencies, nongovernmental organizations 

and the private sector. These events used real-world scenarios 

and DARPA-like challenges to drive rapid innovation of 

information-sharing technologies with special focus on the 

interoperability of geospatial tools. “Strong Angel paved the 

way for a more concentrated effort to produce, collect and 

disseminate open geospatial data,” said Crowley. The National 

Science Foundation and the National Defense University were 

key partners, and private sector team members have included 

representatives of Google, ESRI, Microsoft and Cisco Systems 

to name just a few, said Crowley. 

Solidifying Relationships

In late 2009 the International Conference of Crisis Mappers 

convened a public-private dialogue under the auspices of 

Harvard and Tufts Universities to delve more deeply into 

geospatial information technologies. Crisis Mappers is a 

self-organized network of individuals from the humanitarian, 

development, human rights, policy, technology and academic 

communities. The overarching purpose, said Crowley, was 

to understand and harness the potential of crowd sourcing, 

text messaging, human geography, remote sensing and other 

tools to provide the best possible geospatial data for disaster 

planning and crisis response. “The face-to-face relationships, 

the exchanging of contacts, the collective awareness of 

capabilities — the Crisis Mappers’ network was what made 

the Haiti response unique,” Crowley asserted.

When the earthquake struck Haiti, VTCs like Crisis Mappers 

knew exactly how they could help. As a World Bank 

Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery report 

summarized, VTCs collaborated across specialties. Volunteer 

experts in remote sensing exchanged the latest aerial and 

satellite imagery and committed thousands of hours of labor to 

process more than 9 terabytes of raw imagery. Cartographers 

and Web technologists used the imagery to build an 

OpenStreetMap workflow that generated vector, or line data, 

sending the results to the MapAction team in the U.N.’s On-Site 

Operations Coordination Centre. In addition to these new 

maps, Ushahidi and other text messaging-based platforms 

placed the locations of more than 30,000 reports from the 

affected population into a Haitian text messaging shortcode. 

Volunteers at Stanford University worked with 1,200 members 

of the Haitian diaspora to translate these reports (usually 

received via text message or Twitter) into English, generally 

within five minutes of posting. Other VTCs built on this 

initial work. With the World Bank’s guidance, volunteers with 

GEOCAN employed remote sensing tools to produce damage 

assessments that captured the spatial scale and magnitude of 

the disaster. 

Creating a Neutral Space

The power of the crowd created an expectation for future 

disaster response efforts and prompted NGA analysts to find a 

way to interact with the VTCs. Christina Higgins, NGA’s Office 

of Geospatial Management team lead, confirmed OGM’s role 

was to bring the right people together, with perspectives 

ground in operations, policy, law and humanitarian assistance 

and disaster response, to develop a model for collaboration. 

The technology solution was easier to evaluate than the legal 

and policy implications, Higgins said. “OGM led us through 

a paradigm shift toward open, shareable and accessible 

geospatial data, so that we could enable but not get in the way 

of the crowd,” added Baucom. 

OGM launched this change process at the October 2010 

CrisisMappers conference at Harvard. “The OGM team started 

asking questions — what do we need to know? How do 

we partner? What roadblocks do we need to get through?” 

Crowley recalled. Three objectives framed the answer to these 

questions. First, the process needed to preserve the U.S. Agency 

for International Development’s role as lead federal agency 

for foreign disaster assistance. Second, the process needed 

to be designed around “demand-pull” requests for baseline 

geospatial data from the VTCs. And third, the process needed 

to be transparent. Given what’s at stake during a disaster 

response, the VTCs, National System for Geospatial Intelligence 

(the community of GEOINT partners including Department of 

Defense, intelligence community, civil, industry, academia and 

service providers), NGA and lead federal agencies needed a high 

level of confidence in each other and in the rules of the road for 

exchanging and using open source and commercial imagery 

and geospatial data. It was a problem ready-made for the type 

of experiments Strong Angel conducted. 

Using the Strong Angel model, Crowley encouraged the 

VTCs and NGA to collaborate during a series of quarterly field 

experiments at Camp Roberts, Calif., in 2011 known as RELIEF 

(Research and Experimentation for Local and International 

Emergency First Responders). According to OGM’s Dave 

Reed, lead staff officer in OGM responsible for examining the 

VTC concept, “RELIEF provided the neutral space we needed 

to look at the broad range of legal, policy and operational 

issues associated with interaction between the VTCs and that 

growing group of USG (U.S. government) agencies who are 

NSG mission partners and involved in disaster response.” 

Defining Roles for Consistency, 

Common Reference

The Camp Roberts RELIEF experiments produced a 

conceptual work flow for geospatial information, with the 

Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit (HIU) in 

the role of facilitator. The HIU — an interagency unit housed 

in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s Office of the 

Geographer and Global Issues — is developing a procedure 

to manage and prioritize VTC requests for baseline data. 

Working closely with the department’s imagery center and 

NGA support team, members of the NSG maintain situational 

awareness on where and how to access open geospatial data 

Pathfinder » July/August 2012
20

Disaster Response Efforts Highlight Value of Relationships, Nontraditional Partners

including crowd-sourced geospatial information and 

participatory mapping products. 

“The beauty of this collaboration,” said Crowley, “is that the 

VTCs no longer have to rely on ad hoc personal networks 

to obtain imagery. The HIU is a ‘go-to’ group of geographers 

and analysts who provide an open interface with the U.S. 

government, and who are able to assess requests and 

release fresh imagery and vector data using a new and 

innovative workflow.”

Benson Wilder, a humanitarian affairs analyst with the HIU, 

credits OGM and the Camp Roberts RELIEF experiments 

with “helping us develop a structure to fit the logic we’ve 

seen all along — the Volunteer Technical Communities 

have the ability to add detail that is meaningful to the 

disaster response community, and we should provide the 

best possible data as a basis for them to start from.” 

Sustaining Momentum

The long-term value of open geospatial data for disaster 

planning and response may be incalculable. As articulated 

by Wilder: “No clear lines exist between disaster response, 

recovery and long-term sustainable development — that 

is true for programs as well as the data used and created 

during their implementation. A development program might 

mitigate or prevent a disaster, and a well-executed disaster 

response can and should lead to more resilient communities.” 

Open data remains the driving force for resiliency because 

“it enables a common baseline for decision making across 

organizations,” explained Joshua Campbell, a geographic 

information system architect with the HIU. Returning to 

the VTCs’ value added in producing geospatial information 

products infused with local knowledge of roads and 

infrastructure, Campbell commented that “this is how we get 

food to a certain spot, how we deliver vaccines more efficiently 

— open road and infrastructure data provides the foundation 

for a coordinated response by synchronizing planning and 

operations through the same lens.” 

Partnership building clearly demands a lot of patience. 

Baucom and her colleagues at the HIU look forward to 

stewarding the relationship with the VTCs in parallel with the 

stand-up of NGA’s IWG-R3, which provides content, processing 

and application services to NGA’s emergency preparedness, 

response and recovery mission partners. The constructs and 

relationships developed with the VTCs give the IWG-R3 a jump 

start toward mission success, with more rapid, dynamic and 

effective ways of accessing NGA’s unclassified information. In 

turn, the increasing availability of high-quality open geospatial 

information means that during a crisis response, NGA analysts 

can dedicate more time to performing deeper and more 

predictive analyses for its mission partners. 

This screen resolution graphic of 

Port Au Prince, Haiti, courtesy 

of OpenStreetMap, illustrates 

the detailed foundation data 

provided by Volunteer Technical 

Communities following the 

January 2010 earthquake, including Haiti’s critical roads, infrastructure and emerging camps 

for those who were displaced 

from their homes.

Pathfinder » July/August 2012
21

Our Heritage: Personal Influence Affects Charts, Maps, Surveys

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s productive 

relationships with universities and the scientific community 

extend well back into the history of our predecessor organizations. 

From the beginning these important connections took the form of very 

personal alliances and professional arrangements fashioned by individuals 

significant to our history. The U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office (Hydro) offers 

a case in point. The lack of funding, manpower and resources in a country 

burdened by the Great Depression forced naval and scientific leaders to 

look for collaborative solutions to acquire the data necessary to promote 

scientific inquiry, safe navigation and the national defense.

During the 1930s the Hydrographic Office did some of the most 

comprehensive surveys in its history and cooperated with universities 

and private research institutions as far as its budget and the political 

climate would permit. The Navy conducted work on temperature, salinity, 

currents, gravity, water chemistry and ocean bottom topography, as well 

as basic mapmaking surveys in cooperation with the Scripps Institution 

of Oceanography, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and 

other interested groups.

Although the Pacific increasingly drew the attention of American grand 

strategists during the 1930s, the Navy applied the bulk of its limited 

hydrographic resources to the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico region. 

From the strategic point of view, the Navy’s concentration on home 

waters was not entirely misplaced. A complete understanding of the 

sea passages into the Gulf of Mexico, as well as an appreciation of the 

oceanographic character of the approaches to the Panama Canal, needed 

little justification. In a January 1928 letter to Chief of 

Naval Operations Adm. Charles F. Hughes, the Bureau 

of Navigation defended the need for new, more 

detailed surveys in the vicinity of the Canal Zone by 

citing the region’s strategic importance in the event 

of war. By that time Hydro already had the results of 

the USS Niagara’s three-month reconnaissance of the 

Gulf of Panama and the Pearl Islands. The ship’s crew 

erected a series of triangulation towers to better 

determine the accuracy of the available charts and 

found them significantly flawed. 

In the process of planning new surveys and 

coordinating data collection, Hydrographer of the Navy 

Rear Adm. Walter R. Gherard cultivated relationships 

with the directors of two premier oceanographic 

institutions to obtain assistance, instruments and 

advice. Thomas Wayland Vaughan of Scripps and Henry 

Bryant Bigelow of Woods Hole recognized, along with 

Gherardi, that the scarcity of funds, ships and personnel 

made them all mutually dependent.

In August 1932 Gherardi asked Bigelow for assistance 

in obtaining some instruments Hydro needed in its 

surveys. Bigelow replied in early September that he 

had no spare instruments to loan, but perhaps he 

could help in another way. Bigelow offered WHOI’s 

assistance in training naval officers to use unfamiliar 

instrumentation. He wanted the admiral to assign 

one of his officers to WHOI’s research vessel, Atlantis, 

scheduled to depart on Sept. 20 for the Gulf of Maine. 

If someone from the naval survey vessel USS Hannibal 

went on the voyage, “he would see all the operations 

and have a chance to thoroughly familiarize himself 

with the whole procedure,” stated Bigelow. 

Gherardi wasted no time in accepting the offer. 

He wrote to Bigelow on Sept. 9 that he found the 

suggestion very gracious and constructive and 

would certainly select a member of the Hannibal 

crew to accompany Atlantis. By Sept. 14 Hydro 

ordered Cmdr. Charles C. Slayton, commanding 

officer of Hannibal, to join the WHOI expedition. 

Slayton’s experiences with data collection methods 

and his participation in the activities of the cruise 

permitted Hydro to reap great benefit. As Gherardi 

commented to Bigelow in a letter penned Sept. 30, 

1932, “There is nothing equal to the personal contact 

with those who have had continuing practical 

In the process of planning new surveys and coordinating data collection, Hydrographer of the 

Navy Rear Adm. Walter R. Gherardi cultivated a relationship with the director of the Scripps 

Institution of Oceanography, Thomas Wayland Vaughan, photographed in his office in 1932. 

Photo courtesy of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

Pathfinder » July/August 2012

Personal Influence Affects Charts, Maps, Surveys 

Dr. Gary E. Weir, NGA Chief Historian
22

Our Heritage: Personal Influence Affects Charts, Maps, Surveys

experience in the use of special apparatus and getting 

a first-hand experience in its use.” For Hydro, sowing the 

seeds of a long-term relationship made operational, 

scientific and fiscal sense.

Gherardi also cultivated a close professional connection 

with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. He worked 

more closely with Vaughan than any other civilian scientific 

leader and both Hydro and Scripps profited immensely. 

While all oceanographic institutions, universities and 

seagoing businesses relied upon Hydro for essential 

navigational charts, only Scripps had the advantage 

of seeing the essential data for these charts before the 

information went to the publisher. By agreement with 

Gherardi, Scripps received the oceanographic survey data 

directly from naval vessels like Hannibal and Nokomis. 

Vaughan convinced the Navy to permit Scripps’ scientists 

to perform the chemical and physical analyses necessary 

to render the information useful for chart composition. 

This gave Scripps personnel the first opportunity to use 

the information to augment their vision of the ocean and it 

gave Hydro a way of working up the data at minimal cost to 

the Navy. 

Vaughan realized early the possibilities of the alliance 

with the Navy and worked to strengthen and exploit it 

further. He asked Gherardi Oct. 1, 1932, if “it would be 

possible for one of our men to work on board one of 

your vessels while operating in the Gulf of Panama in 

order to carry out certain analyses.” Along with the trip 

taken by Slayton on board Atlantis at Bigelow’s invitation, 

this request by Vaughan set a significant precedent for 

exchange of personnel for research and training purposes. 

Hydro immediately applied for permission to take a 

civilian scientist from Scripps on board Hannibal in the 

Gulf of Panama. By late November Gherardi received final 

approval from the Bureau of Navigation and informed 

Scripps on Dec. 9, writing to the institution’s acting 

director, Eric G. Moberg, while Vaughan travelled in Europe 

on business. Five days later Moberg informed Hydro that 

he intended to send the Canadian Richard H. Fleming 

to Hannibal. Fleming worked as a research assistant 

at Scripps while pursuing his doctorate in chemical 

oceanography at the University of California. 

Collaboration between scientists and naval personnel on 

Navy ships, like that accomplished by Fleming on Hannibal, 

continued, as would the analytical services Scripps provided 

to the Hydrographic Office. With the Fleming voyage, 

Vaughan and Gherardi fortified significantly the BigelowAtlantis precedent for civilian-naval cooperation in field 

research. These relationships enabled Hydrographic Office 

personnel to provide the latest and best picture of the 

ocean to mariners worldwide, an endeavor still very much 

part of the NGA mission. 

The USS Nokomis (at left) and USS Aramis 

completed a Caribbean survey for the Navy 

Hydrographic Office, circa 1933. The U.S. Navy 

often used schooners and yachts for non-combat 

duty. These vessels regularly conducted terrestrial 

and ocean surveys, providing data for ocean charts 

and maps. 

Photo courtesy of the National Archives

Pathfinder » July/August 2012