DGI Conference round up…

I’ve just finished two days working with SGI at the Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) Conference in London. #dgiconference In this post I give a brief round up…

There were some very interesting concepts and applications being shown at DGI. Many vendors had systems that allowed exploring detail of a landscape. This included things like terrain mapping from imagery, flood prediction overlays on the coast, and determining how boggy ground is when planning an operation.

Also on show was an application that takes a live video stream and positional data from the camera, and converts that in to aerial photography polygons which can be overlaid in real time on to a map. I had an interesting conversation with this chap, as he did not believe any database could take the metadata for all the frames and positional data and catalogue them in real time, given the rate of photography. I personally think with MarkLogic this can easily be done, but there was no convincing him!

Of particular interest to me was the fact that in all these applications they were running limited amounts of data through relational database systems. BAe System’s GXP Xplorer, for example, currently uses Postgres. They haven’t tested a huge rate of queries, so haven’t yet hit performance issues. I predict they, along with the other app vendors present, will (especially with Oracle support on their road map!). In addition they for some reason are only able to do a basic ‘show me whats in this square’ geospatial query. I made sure to let them know about MarkLogic’s advanced geospatial functionality. Apparently they really want circle (lat/lon and radius) query, but can’t currently do this! This is easy for MarkLogic.

There were a couple of our partners there we’ve worked with before.  As I said, I was working with SGI on their stand, talking about Big Data and their DataRaptor appliance with the MarkLogic database installed, validated and supported by them. I also had brief chats with ESRI and Raytheon who we have worked with before on large US DoD and IC projects.

The main session talks were good. Lots of input from the British Military. Several RAF and Army senior officers giving opinions on what’s going on with Geospatial and multi source intelligence, along with the restructuring going on. Only downside was the really badly laid out exhibition hall where booths were cramped together in the middle rather than laid out logically on the conference room edges. A few good conversations had though, and some useful insights gleaned.