The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) recently unveiled a groundbreaking geospatial-intelligence advancement platform to improve innovation and collaboration with partners across industry, academia, and other data users, the agency announced September 5. By harnessing NGA’s vast commercial imagery holdings, coupled with the opportunity to leverage the speed of innovation across industry and academia, the NGA Unclassified Data Lake (NUDL) serves as the means and method to rapidly demonstrate, evaluate, and scale proven solutions.
NUDL was designed in alignment with the NGA Data Strategy to fulfill industry and academia data needs. In 2022, Mr. Deepak Kundal, NGA’s Chief Data Officer, engaged with Congressional staff on the conceptual idea to establish a robust data lake house architecture, marking a pivotal step towards achieving an overarching NGA data strategy objective – fostering an integrated modern data architecture that fosters partnerships and interoperability. “NUDL exemplifies our commitment in delivering shared data services and serves as a testament to NGA’s pursuit of a cohesive and agile data ecosystem,” said Mr. Kundal.
NUDL was commissioned in April 2022 as a Congressionally Directed Action (CDA) to build a commercial imagery data lake that would both foster innovation and increase partnerships with industry, academia, government and GEOINT users. Since its initial launch and throughout development, the technology used in building the NUDL has proven useful in real-world applications, such as research initiatives and humanitarian assistance/disaster response operations.
As an NGA cloud native system, NUDL features include the ability to interact with imagery and data with exploitation and geospatial features including SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC), Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning/Computer Vision (AI/ML/CV) and Mosaic imagery tools allowing you to build, train, and deploy ML models and algorithms across data holdings, at scale. The NUDL was initially deployed on the External Cloud (XC) with a mirrored deployment scheduled for the Unclassified Cloud (UC) in summer 2024. This approach ensures industry and academia can access and demonstrate their capabilities on the XC via traditional username and password authentication. Then, once a technology is selected for adoption, the UC side of NUDL will provide the opportunity to scale across all relevant data holdings through CAC-enabled authentication, widening the partnership to other government agencies in order to further interoperability and data sharing.
“The NUDL is an innovative approach designed to serve as a nexus between academia, industry, and mission users. The platform provides a seamless and comprehensive solution for users to navigate the intersection of new technologies and mission-driven challenges and allows us to treat innovation as a pipeline, rather than a series of disparate, stove-piped efforts,” said Chris Heath, lead engineer for NGA’s Data Services Integrated Program Office.
Source: NGA
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