North Bethesda, Maryland, USA, 20 August 2015 – Progressive Technology Federal Systems Inc. (PTFS), a provider of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, will demonstrate a Multi-INT change detection service at the 2015 Department of Defense Intelligence Information Systems Worldwide Conference (DoDIIS). The new service enables clients to correlate change on the earth’s surface with other geospatial and textual information, as well as social media feeds, to gain a comprehensive understanding about the change.
“PTFS developed this service so that analysts can easily pinpoint when and where change has occurred in their area of interest,” said Dan Quinn, PTFS Vice President. “They can then dig deeper into their collections of geospatial and other unstructured content to determine the type of change and other relevant intelligence surrounding the change. The ability to geospatially tag non-geospatial products is a unique Knowvation GS capability.”
The change detection service runs on top of the PTFS Knowvation ECM solution, a web-based federated search and discovery application that manages structured and unstructured content in many databases at multiple locations across the enterprise. Available behind the client firewall or in the Amazon cloud, Knowvation allows users to perform full-text and geospatial searches to retrieve content from big data collections. Searchable content includes satellite/aerial imagery, text documents, books, newspapers, video, audio, photographs and social media feeds.
Introduced 11 years ago as ArchivalWare, Knowvation is deployed in government agencies, libraries, academic institutions, and labor unions. The largest installations are within the U.S. federal government at DoD sites.
PTFS teamed with MDA Information Systems LLC (MDA) of Gaithersburg, Md., to provide the change layer at the heart of this new service. MDA has applied proprietary digital algorithms to many years of Landsat satellite imagery to identify land use and land cover change around the globe. These changes may be natural, such as deforestation caused by fire or insect infestation, or they may include man-made activities, such as construction and development.
“As part of the service, clients can license the MDA change detection information to add new layers on top of their own data within Knowvation ECM,” said Quinn. “Change that has occurred incrementally from one year to the next is color coded to indicate not only where but when it happened.”
PTFS will demonstrate the change detection service in booth #207 at the 2015 DoDIIS conference being hosted by the Defense Intelligence Agency Aug. 23-26 in San Antonio.
The demo will feature an area of Yemen where a new port is under construction. Construction progress on the facility is readily seen in the 30-meter Landsat imagery. The user can then query a raster database in Knowvation to access higher resolution imagery and see that new docks have been built. To obtain even more up-to-date information on the docks, the user can query recent social media feeds through Knowvation.
“People working in the Yemen port or simply walking by are frequently posting information on social media regarding construction status,” said Quinn. “Knowvation ECM can perform either geographic or key word searches on the metadata of Twitter, Flickr and YouTube postings to access comments, photos and even videos of the port – posted just minutes earlier.”
Combining full-text and geospatial queries sets Knowvation apart from many other Enterprise Content Management systems, and the addition of real-time social media feeds allows Knowvation clients to access up-to-the-minute information from outside their own databases.
About PTFS (www.PTFS.com)
Progressive Technology Federal Systems Inc. (PTFS) is a leading provider of Enterprise Content Management solutions to federal, civilian, defense and intelligence agencies. Established in 1995 and headquartered in North Bethesda, Md., just outside Washington, D.C., PTFS launched its flagship ECM offering, Knowvation (originally ArchivalWare) in 2004. Knowvation is an entirely web-based product best known for providing geospatial, FOIA & declassification, database integration, and digital library solutions.