GEOINT

For NGA, key to open source might be embracing uncertainty

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has made a point of hitching its operations to the recent boom in open source data. The intelligence community’s mapping agency has in the last few months released a software toolkit for crowdsourcing on GitHub and created a website for sharing unclassified information on the Arctic, for example.

With that work in full swing, the next step for the agency’s push to leverage open source information could be philosophical rather than technical.

NGA has traditionally treated locational accuracy as “one of our zero-tolerance businesses,” with expectations of 100 percent accuracy, Deputy Director Susan Gordon said in a recent interview. “I think it’s a challenge, but I think we need to be less binary about perfect precision for every single one of our customers.”