The US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and DigitalGlobe have jointly released Hootenanny, a new open source project to enhance the way crowdsourced mapping influence geospatial big data analytics.
Through GitHub, a web-based Git repository hosting service, Hootenanny provides a scalable processing engine and interactive editing interface to help users rapidly conflate, or reconcile, map features generated from satellite imagery, unmanned aerial vehicles and mobile devices, as NGA explained.
“The commercialization of GEOINT [GEOspatial INTelligence] is leading to exponential growth of publicly available geospatial information. Hootenanny as an open source project will enable new levels of data sharing across the community that will increase our nation’s ability to quickly respond to emerging threats. This is a pro-active move that steers into the collaborative mapping environment to derive more value from unclassified sources,” said Chris Rasmussen, NGA’s public software development lead.
The collaborative project OpenStreetMap™ has been a direct influence in the development of Hootenanny, establishing an open architecture to facilitate the integration of diverse geospatial datasets into a common key value data structure. Besides the utilities of OpenStreetMap™, Hootenanny also enables Geospatial Extract Transform Load (ETL) capabilities supporting various schemas such as Topographic Data Store (TDS), and Multi-National Geospatial Co-Production Program (MGCP).
