Geospatial intelligence (GEOINT)
GEOINT is an intelligence collection discipline that applies to national security intelligence, law enforcement intelligence, and competitive intelligence. An analyst can use GEOINT to identify the route of least resistance for a military force in a hostile country, to discover a pattern in the locations of reported burglaries in a neighborhood, or to generate a map and comparison of failing businesses that a company is likely to purchase. GEOINT is also the geospatial product of a process that is focused externally, designed to reduce the level of uncertainty for a decision maker, and that uses information derived from all sources. Some of the sources of collected imagery information for GEOINT are imagery satellites, cameras on airplanes, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and drones, handheld cameras, maps, or GPS coordinates.
GIS is its ability to fuse geospatial data with other forms of intelligence collection, such as signals intelligence (SIGINT), measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT), human intelligence (HUMINT), or open source intelligence (OSINT). A GIS user can incorporate and fuse all of these types of intelligence into applications that provide corroborated GEOINT throughout an organization’s information system. A majority of national security intelligence decisions involve geography and GEOINT. GIS allows the user to capture, manage, exploit, analyze, and visualize geographically referenced information, physical features, and other geospatial data. GIS is thus a critical infrastructure for the GEOINT and national security community in manipulating and interpreting spatial knowledge in an information system.