Geocento is an aggregator of imagery and related products and services from the range of suppliers, based on innovative web technologies. The company plans to use its in-depth knowledge of user cases to deign and test a Chatbot interface for users of imagery, which will improve significantly the experience for users who can be overwhelmed by the complexity of the experience of discovering and ordering imagery. This technology will be established on top of Geocento's aggregating APIs that access imagery from a wide range of image suppliers and will also reflect Geocento's consolidated offerings. The impact of this development will be to substantially lower the barriers to entry and costs of developing access to imagery for users while at the same time growing market penetration for suppliers.

Satellite imagery is an extremely useful source of data for emergencies and potential emergencies. It provides large scale surveillance of conditions, but now at spatial resolutions down to 0.5m. There are some 140 earth observing satellites in orbit, representing a huge virtual constellation of surveillance capability, expected to double in the current decade. However, in many cases these data are not being used effectively for emergency response because of a reactive approach in the industry to image acquisition. We propose to develop and define a pro-active approach to the tasking of satellite imagery in emergency response by the monitoring and interrogation of social media feeds as well as alerts from relevant organisations, so that the data can be rapidly accessed and exploited by emergency responders. The outcome of this proposed project will be a defined capability to optimise the use of satellite surveillance in a range of emergency situations. The market for this is considerable and currently under-served by satellites for a number of reasons which we intend to address technically and commercially.

The Gulf of Mexico oil spill shocked the oil and gas industry into undertaking a comprehensive study into how to improve global oil spill response. GeoCento is involved in providing an assessment of surveillance capabilities for global oil spill response as part of this study, and we anticipate a recommendation for a global oil spill response capability underpinned by effective multi satellite scheduling, acquisition and near real time distribution. We consider that the SatApps Catapult is well placed to develop such a capability based on technologies available within the Harwell cluster, including our own. We plan to carry out a study to assess how the satellite elements of a global oil spill response capability might be developed at the SatApps Catapult, leading to an important operational capability and customer base but leading also to potential additional clients for example in the security sector. The resulting technology would be key for the overall capability of the Catapult.

For several decades, earth-orbiting satellites have been used as platforms for imaging the Earth. This technology has now created a wide ranging market for satellite imagery that is in excess of £600M, and growing at a compound rate of 13% p.a., with applications as diverse as pipeline routing, land use assessment, real estate, iceberg tracking and insurance assessment. However, the market is being constrained by difficulties in gaining easy, timely and efficient access to data. Our innovation voucher will support GeoCento in developing an effective medium to long term strategy for offering global open data through its image search engine, EarthImages, supporting not only our business, but also the Satellite Applications Catapult which is hosting our technology, and a range of 3rd party services.