Community Data Enrichment

I love IMDB. I love being able to find movies that I am interested in, read a plot synopsis and then review the millions of reviews that the site houses. To me, those millions of reviews are where the value is, that is what keeps bringing me back to it. That value isn’t in its ability to aggregate widely available data, it is that they are taking this massive amount of data and then providing a platform for a community of highly interested users to enrich the experience for everyone. This enrichment comes through the reviewers sharing of a unique perspective, presenting ideas and interpretations of the movies through different optics than your own or simply telling you that Bruce Willis is a ghost in Sixth Sense and not marking **SPOILER ALERT** in the description.

I am writing about my love of IMDB not just because I love IMDB, but because the concept of data enrichment has been something that I have been a big advocate of within the NV5 Geospatial (formerly Harris) team for a while. With our Jagwire product, we had a great opportunity to lean forward and help drive the type of environment where we could enable this experience for our customers.

Most Unmanned Platforms (or “drones” for our non-Defense customers) have metadata that is available out of the box. This metadata (which can also include data from the sensor) typically is focused on providing spatial and temporal context (“where” was it and “when” was it there). This information is critical but, like IMDB, the ability to add community enriched data, (those user reviews in IMDB) to the geospatial products in Jagwire provides an unbelievable amount of value. Machine learning, automated image analytics and other technologies that help interpret objects, actions and even intent in data will continue to improve exponentially, but today nothing beats an analyst identifying an object as a “water tower” in an image or an engineer identifying damage to a utility pole after a storm. This enriched data is powerful. This type of data helps rapidly close the gap between “looking” for data and “taking action”.

The understanding of the value of this data is why Jagwire has so many entry points for our communities of users to share their understanding, expertise and perspective. Annotations, chat rooms and visual mark ups are a few examples of how Jagwire enables this type of interaction with the data. Over the next year we are going to continue to collaborate with our customers and partners in the Defense, Utility and Public Safety communities to expand in these areas within Jagwire. Our customers are continually challenging us to find ways to extract more value from their data and we are up to the challenge.