The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has launched a $200,000 competition on the Challenge.gov website for programs that would help address the agency’s disparate data challenges.The challenge aims to provide unified access to data with different formats, schemas, interfaces and locations to support applications such as business metrics and information analytics, NGA said Tuesday.
NGA Director Robert Cardillo said the agency is in need of technology and tools that will work to analyze big data and relay the information to its clients.
“We want ideas on how to seamlessly pull together these wildly disparate data sources — everything from imagery, social media, documents, video, et cetera — to create robust products for our customers,” said Col. Marc DiPaolo, chief of mainstreaming capabilities at NGA’s enterprise innovation office.
The first stage of the challenge requires participants to develop a functional code designed to access and retrieve the supplied representative data sets from a variety of sources.
NGAÂ will select 15Â participants who will receive $10,000 and move on to the second part of the competition.
The selected competitors will then take part in a Dem-o-thon in Washington, D.C., where a panel of NGA judges will test the submitted code.
The agency will award $25,000, $15,000 and $10,000 in cash prizes to the first-, second- and third-place winners, respectively.
