The mission of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is to provide timely, relevant, and accurate geospatial intelligence to support national security. NGA defines geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) as “the exploitation and analysis of imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually depict physical features and geographically referenced activities on the Earth.” NGA faces a crisis of need in the post-9/11 world. Without effective GEOINT, the nation and its armed services are vulnerable to security risks and threats. NGA must improve the speed, rigor, accuracy, fidelity and relevance of its geospatial analyses while the sources of data increase in number and type, and data volume grows. Because GEOINT is rapidly moving to ever finer temporal, spatial, radiometric and spectral resolutions, increased volumes and more complex data must be absorbed: that is, captured, stored, analyzed and reported. The time horizons of problems that the intelligence community seeks to understand have gone from months and days to hours and minutes. Other challenges include adopting and spearheading new methods and technologies while maintaining fully operational existing systems; integrating data from a host of old and new sources through rapid georectification and spatial analysis; improving uncertainty management, including dealing with denial and deception; dealing with data volume issues, especially the need to automate human interpretation tasks; ubiquity of access, including web-based systems and the effective reuse of existing data; and the ability to work effectively within a broadening pool of partners and allies while maintaining appropriate security control. The challenges can be summarized as the conversion of what is today data into distilled information and knowledge. Yet analysis methods have not evolved to rapidly integrate multiple sources of data to create actionable intelligence. Nor do today's means of information dissemination, indexing and preservation suit this new agenda or future needs. NGA will play a major role for the entire intelligence community in creating the next-generation National System for Geospatial-Intelligence and has set forth a consistent vision of what this next generation GEOINT should be. The vision is intended to see NGA through the transition into a new era. NGA also plays a leading role in supporting fundamental research for the next generation of GEOINT, termed GEOINT2 in this document. It is within this context that the National Academies was asked by the NGA to identify research priorities and strategic directions in geospatial science for the NGA’s Basic and Applied Research Program. The goal of the study was to examine both “hard problems” in geospatial science that must be addressed to improve geospatial intelligence, as well as promising methods and tools to pursue in geospatial science and related disciplines. The results of this study are intended to help NG... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]