USGIF’s Technology Day, part of GEOINT Community Week, kicked off Thursday morning in Reston, Va., with an Emerging Technology Showcase.

Opening speaker was Al Price of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), who spoke about upcoming GEOINT tradecraft certification, which is part of the overall mandate by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, requiring each intelligence discipline to implement its own certification guidelines.

The NGA has chosen to partner with USGIF, which has a thorough academic accreditation certification program, to develop its professional certification program.

“In order to be a success it must be a strong public and private partnership,” Price said.

He added that the NGA plans to be as precise as possible throughout the process and to take advantage of the advanced staff and talent USGIF has to offer.

Price said he envisions the certification process will include four progressional steps: basic, full performance, advanced/executive, and expert. He also projects there will be processes specific to military, civilian, and commercial professionals.

You can expect to see more coverage of this vital issue in trajectory in print and online as the certification program continues to develop.

Community-guided Cyberinfrastructure

Dr. Jennifer Schopf, of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Geosciences Directorate, provided a presentation on a new and unorthodox project the foundtion has undertaken called Earthcube.

Earthcube is a community-guided cyberinfrastructure designed to integrate data for knowledge management across the geosciences.

“This is much a process as it is a project,” Schopf said, as the NSF is typically funding other organizations as opposed to initiating its own new projects.

She described the theme of the project as community-driven, with a focus on collaboration and conversation rather than competition.

A SPARQLing Standard

Dave Kolas of Raytheon presented on behalf of the Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) newly approved standard called GeoSPARQL. SPARQL is a new query language for databases, able to retrieve and manipulate data stored in RDF format.

“GeoSPARQL defines a vocabulary for representing geospatial data in RDF, and it defines an extension to the SPARQL query language for processing geospatial data,” according to the OGC website.