WASHINGTON, March 28, 2017 — (PRNewswire) —   Radiant.earth announced today that it has selected software engineering firm Vizzuality and Azavea's Raster Foundry imagery processing platform to help build its premiere open imagery platform. The contract awards move Radiant closer to connecting the global development community to the vast resources of imagery, spatial data, analytical tools, and supporting service solutions to respond to the world's most critical challenges.

The new Radiant platform will support open formats, data standards, as well as common core and extensible metadata. All data, applications and services will be available with open licenses and freely accessible via shared infrastructure. 

"We intend to change the paradigm and make earth imagery, data, and the software tools to analyze the imagery more easily accessible for the global development community.  The international and global development community is increasingly pressured to find impactful solutions dealing with traditional societal issues and fast moving calamities," says Radiant CEO Anne Hale Miglarese.  "We want to provide the best open data that the geospatial sector has to offer whether for food security, property rights, global health or other societal issues.

Radiant's Chief Technology Officer Dan Lopez further adds, "These awards are critical for Radiant to deliver a shared infrastructure allowing us to improve collaboration and discovery of imagery data worldwide. A major goal is to reduce costs and empower decision-making . . . the opportunity for innovation is also enormous. Developers will be able to access the data with open APIs, which will foster open source collaboration and grow the development ecosystem working from the platform."

Craig Mills, CEO of Vizzuality emphasizes the need for simplicity in the design and architecture of the Radiant platform. "We're honored to contribute to the Radiant vision. For Radiant to be successful we are going to need the help of the community. As we design, build and share early versions we will learn how to make an application that saves people hours, days and weeks of time. For the people finding, analyzing and using earth observation imagery through Radiant, we hope to make the experience as beautiful as the imagery of earth itself," says Mills. 

Azavea CEO Robert Cheetham believes that Radiant's platform will fill a vital gap in the imagery technology landscape. "Azavea is excited to be contributing its Raster Foundry technology as a foundation for the new Radiant platform. This will create a central location to share and analyze openly-licensed imagery data. The growth in the volume of imagery data has outstripped the ability for even experienced analysts to extract value from it. Azavea is pleased to work with Radiant to create software that will make it simpler and easier to access, use, and analyze imagery for everyone," says Cheetham.

The MVP is expected to be ready in mid-July.

About Radiant
A registered non-profit, Radiant responds to continuous calls by the global development community for better access to open imagery, analytical tools and capacity building, all of which fuel greater analysis and insight into the various challenges facing societies across the globe. Radiant is funded by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Omidyar 

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SOURCE Radiant.earth