Facility Informatics with GeoVisipedia (Final Report)

Abstract

Characterization and understanding of nuclear fuel cycle facilities is of considerable interest to DNN R&D and the nonproliferation community due to their importance in nuclear weapons manufacture. Satellite imagery is a key source of information about these facilities, particularly in denied areas. Such imagery can be useful in its own right but annotations applied to the imagery vastly expand the value of the imagery and its usefulness by providing object descriptions, context and potentially linkages to other relevant information. GeoVisipedia (Geospatial Visual Wikipedia) is a new and novel approach to collecting, organizing, sharing and preserving knowledge about nuclear facilities to support nonproliferation efforts. Our approach is unique in that it emphasizes geospatial visual information about nuclear facilities rather than focusing exclusively on textual information. GeoVisipedia users, such as all-source analysts and decision makers, have access to richly annotated nuclear facility imagery with hyperlinks to visual and textual information that provides users with details and context about the facility. A major accomplishment of this project was to develop technology that allows annotations from one satellite image of a facility to be propagated to other satellite imagery of the facility. New satellite imagery of the facility is automatically populated with all previous annotations of the facility. This technology breakthrough provides users with the annotations, and hence knowledge and insight, from all the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who have previously annotated imagery of the facility. This capability was demonstrated in a GeoVisipedia prototype, awarded a patent and is described in several publications. In the latter part of the project an informal collaboration was established with the DNN R&D Multi Informatics for Nuclear Operations Scenarios (MINOS) venture. A second prototype of GeoVisipedia was developed that directly supports the MINOS venture. This prototype is called the Nuclear Facility Information Explorer (NFIX) and is tailored to the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) facility, a testbed for the MINOS venture. NFIX downloads sensor metadata and operator logs, parses and displays this information. NFIX has been licensed and deployed to several laboratories participating in the MINOS venture.