Sneak Peek into Skybox Imaging’s Cloudera-powered Satellite System by Justin Kestelyn (@kestelyn)
This is a guest post by Oliver Guinan, VP Ground Software, at Skybox Imaging. Oliver is a 15-year veteran of the internet industry and is responsible for all ground system design, architecture and implementation at Skybox.
One of the great promises of the big data movement is using networks of ubiquitous sensors to deliver insights about the world around us. Skybox Imaging is attempting to do just that for millions of locations across our planet.
Skybox is developing a low cost imaging satellite system and web-accessible big data processing platform that will capture video or images of any location on Earth within a couple of days. The low cost nature of the satellite opens the possibility of deploying tens of satellites which, when integrated together, have the potential to image any spot on Earth within an hour.
Skybox satellites are designed to capture light in the harsh environment of outer space. Each satellite captures multiple images of a given spot on Earth. Once the images are transferred from the satellite to the ground, the data needs to be processed and combined to form a single image, similar to those seen within online mapping portals.
With any sensor network, capturing raw data is only the beginning of the story. We at Skybox are building a system to ingest and process the raw data, allowing data scientists and end users to ask arbitrary questions of the data, then publish the answers in an accessible way and at a scale that grows with the number of satellites in orbit. We selected Cloudera to support this deployment.
Now is the time to start planning topic map based products that can incorporate this type of data.
There are lots of folks who are “curious” about what is happening next door, in the next block, a few “klicks” away, across the border, etc.
Not all of them have the funds for private “keyhole” satellites and vacuum data feeds. But they may have money to pay you for efficient and effective collation of intelligence data.
Topic maps empowering “Intelligence as a Service (InaaS)”?