Google Earth Builder supports NGA geospatial efforts

Google has a contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) for the first instance of Google Earth Builder. Google Earth Builder will enable NGA to use Google’s vast geospatial processing power to enhance its ability to provide timely, relevant and accurate geospatial intelligence to its customers, who span a broad range of U.S. federal government departments and agencies.

Google’s work with NGA marks one of the first major government geospatial cloud initiatives, which will enable NGA to use Google Earth Builder to host its geospatial data and information. This allows NGA to customize Google Earth & Maps to provide maps and globes to support U.S. government activities, including: U.S. national security; homeland security; environmental impact and monitoring; and humanitarian assistance, disaster response and preparedness efforts. This is particularly critical to provide damage and mobility assessments after natural disasters such as the earthquakes in Haiti and Japan or Hurricane Katrina.

NGA has been a long-time user of Google Earth Enterprise. As part of NGA's Geospatial Visualization- Enterprise Services, Google and NGA have teamed up to make it easier for the government to get useful and current geospatial content to federal employees who need it to execute their respective missions. Once an individual has been authorized on one of the government’s secure networks, he or she will be able to access maps customized to his or her specific department or role using Google Earth, Google Maps or via widely-used Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) services.

Behind the scenes, Google Earth Builder will host and serve NGA geospatial content to its mission partners and customers, equipping them with timely information using the user’s tool of choice. NGA will have the ability to use the vast number of cloud resources for rapid processing of the ever-growing quantities of geospatial data and then provide the GEOINT in an online, on-demand environment.

We’ve been excited to work with NGA as one of the early adopters of Google Earth Builder, and are pleased to make the product available to other organizations who want to take advantage of Google’s vast processing power to manage and publish their own geospatial data.

Posted by Sean Wohltman and Phil Dixon, Google Federal Team