NGA posts analytic services RFI

By Loren Blinde April 13, 2018

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On April 12, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency issued a request for information for analytic services (HM0476-18-Q-0021). Responses are due by 12:00 p.m. Eastern on April 26.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is seeking information on commercial services that collect, aggregate, correlate and quantify open source and commercial geospatially-referenced data, and leverage machine learning approaches to produce actionable information through reports and derived data products.

NGA is seeking to explore methods of leveraging the vast amount of available open content to reveal geospatially-referenced activities and patterns that can be delivered in refined and correlated reports and services. To provide a common framework with which to understand current capabilities, NGA is interested in understanding how industry would apply their open content capabilities to a specific problem set: combatting worldwide illicit trafficking. The subject being illicitly trafficked can be objects (i.e., guns, drugs, cars, etc.), living things (i.e., people, animals, etc.), or any other object that could be illicitly trafficked. NGA is interested in current capabilities, so any service(s) described should be available for purchase at the time of the RFI posting. NGA seeks to understand the following elements of the service:

Scalability: the ability of the vendor to scale the service with expanded infrastructure and personnel resources and additional data sources; and the ability of the vendor to scale offerings to enable customers to run a short-term pilot or assessment using a limited problem set. When describing the method for scaling the service(s), the vendor should describe the required expanded infrastructure and personnel resources – and the additional data sources – necessary for each “level” of scalability.
Sources: the ability of the vendor to leverage multiple, diverse open sources (i.e., weather data, social media, geospatially-referenced imagery, geospatially-referenced commodity data, change detection data, OpenStreetMap, GDELT/AP, and other open source data), and – using the vendor’s service(s) – create reports and other derived data products.
License: the vendor must thoroughly describe any and all license conditions and assumptions, such as the ability to share both reports and other derived data products, raw and/or processed imagery, derived products, textual data, metadata and any crowd-sourced data.
Automation: the use of automation and benefits of human intervention, when applied to specific segments of the processing chain
Machine Learning: describe the use of machine learning and training sets, and describe the ability of the vendor’s service(s) to reduce human intervention over time through the use of machine learning.
Geographic Coverage: ability to use diverse data sources to enable coverage of indicators for an issue like illicit trafficking for any location in the world.
Derived Data Accuracy: the vendor’s service should include information on known and tested derived data accuracy regarding the location of specific activities, and clearly address how uncertainty is quantified and addressed.
Metadata: the vendor’s service should provide information on metadata associated with the geo-referenced activity, and also for imagery and other sources used to derive the locations.