Recent Developments Promoting Open-Source Geospatial Synergy: Emerging Trends and Their Impact for Nuclear Nonproliferation Analysis

A number of recent developments in open-source information technology are creating new opportunities for data fusion for nuclear nonproliferation verification applications, particularly when some aspect of that information includes a geospatial component. Those developments include enhanced “new media” data mining tools and techniques to derive cueing information for indications of previously unknown and hence undeclared activity, coupled with rapidly expanding commercial satellite imaging capabilities and constellations, and new means to efficiently access them. In just the past year, there has been a significant expansion in the number of tools available in the open source information toolkit to draw from structured and unstructured big data, inter alia, news media, social media and trade data. New open-source geospatial tools continue to keep pace, making it increasingly easy to follow-up such derived information having a geospatial context. Commercial satellite imagery, as a still relatively new “open-source” technology for routine information collection and analysis, has already been proven to be an effective and accepted means for nuclear monitoring, verification, and mission planning for IAEA safeguards purposes. Commercial satellite imagery (and its requisite processing and analysis) is continuing to evolve and advance as a result of radically new improvements in terms of temporal, spatial, and spectral resolutions from increasingly diverse and rapidly growing international satellite constellations. Improved means of access to this multi-resolution imagery diversity (with rapid revisits for global surveillance in near-real time) will increasingly also provide a new basis for open-source information augmentation with previously unexpected synergistic effects. This paper reviews some key elements of this open-source geospatial (r)evolution, updates earlier work on the subject by these authors, and explains (by way of a few exemplar cases) how this expanding and evolving open-source tool-kit is making it easier, in terms of time and cost, to derive and assess new nuclear nonproliferation relevant information.