Open Source Information Geospatial Overlay (OSIGO)

There is an abundance of text documents, news articles, intelligence reports, etc. containing information that is particularly valuable in understanding and analyzing aerial/satellite imagery. These text documents can be annotated with the corresponding lat/long coordinates of the geospatial references using commercial tools, such as MetaCarta. However, this approach is 1) not scalable since new documents should continuously be annotated and 2) limited to only those geographical features that already exist in the MetaCarta gazetteer. Even if the document is annotated, numerous "links" to all the related documents from a target image is not an effective presentation method. In this project, we will develop the technology for automatically 1) finding text documents relevant to a given imagery without any a priori annotation of the documents (similar to a search engine), 2) ranking the documents based on their geospatial relevance to the imagery, 3) summarizing the documents, and 4) linking the documents to their corresponding location on the imagery. The resulting technology will allow an analyst to view a satellite image for any place in the world, automatically find and link the geospatially related documents, and then browse the summary of the documents to better understand the information shown in an image.