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.
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 of 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 the summer of 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.
Simply stated, NUDL is a persistent service to not only demonstrate the capabilities of a proposed innovative solution, but to adopt and scale when the determination of enduring mission value is made.
Since NGA granted NUDL authority to operate for the XC commercial cloud environment, the platform has hosted approximately 200TB of government and licensed commercial imagery, providing 12 months of rolling access to this data for dozens of pilot organizations across the GEOINT community. NUDL is now available to users from academia, industry, and other government entities who have written agreements in place with NGA.
Since being previewed at the 2024 GEOINT Symposium in early May, NUDL has initiated the onboarding process for a multitude of new user groups. Some of the organizations who have onboarded users include, but are not limited to: United States Geological Survey, Federal Geographic Data Committee, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Taylor Geospatial Institute, Open Geospatial Consortium, Naval Research Labs, University of Missouri, and several internal NGA programs, to include Maven and Moonshot Labs . NGA wishes to onboard additional users from academia, industry and government who currently have, or wish to have, a partnership agreement with NGA.
Even in initial stages of development, a number of opportunities presented themselves to leverage NUDL’s advanced technology. First, the implementation of the Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog within NUDL was demonstrated during a technology event in late 2022. This functionality proved useful to personnel supporting the Turkey earthquake in February of 2023. The catalog function in the NUDL code helped manage the constant flow of new and historical imagery data being used to support rescue and recovery operations.
Later demonstrations of NUDL’s application programming interface showcased its capabilities and fulfilled one of the CDA’s milestones by accessing and ingesting NUDL’s imagery content without having to re-host the imagery data. Another demonstration provided insight into a new technology approach for data management.
Most recently, NGA’s Analysis directorate used NUDL’s test configuration in XC to fully automate data from public sources. The algorithm being hosted on NUDL supports data extraction, transformation, and transfer across security fabrics. This data is being used to fulfill our global mission responsibility. NUDL imagery access is restricted to entities who have written partnership agreements in place with NGA (current and future).
A comprehensive user guide, which offers additional insight about the future of NUDL and a deep dive into its capabilities, can be found at this direct link , along with an onboarding guide for those interested in using the platform.
“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.
