Drones have received quite a few mixed reactions over the last few years. Some find it nuisance and some useful. In commercial markets drones play a role of the data collection devices. Their main task is to store, transmit and capture data. IT departments are considering integration of drone data in the enterprise business process and the requirement of data governance. On maturing the drone technology, significant to know the means of software and information technology.

IoT and big data challenges drone

Till now, the focus of commercial drones has been using the precise visualization and data collection in the integration of IT processes. Applications are developed to assist verticals such as construction, agriculture, mining, telecom and energy with cloud-based services, where the applications are producing and serving the maps for instance, location maps service and manage company infrastructure and resources.

With the big data, challenges of drone data involve curation, sharing, analysis, storage, search, visualization, information and transfer privacy. As people are starting to observe drones effectively replace static IoT sensors with device in motion and apprehend various types of data.

What is unique about drone data?

Similar to the IoT devices in motion, drones are bringing values and at same time have various challenges. Whereas for some part, drone data is imagery, geospatial, binaries, videos for falling in the category of non-standard IoT data. Though, on working in IT, people need some unique requirements to study the data. For instance, needing the image recognition analysis and substantial transformation and data parsing become useful.

Majority of the data collected from drones is utilized by the GIS (geographic information systems). GIS are been used for analyzing and mapping and assimilatng common database operations like statistical analysis and query with geographic analysis and visualization.

Consequences of data governance

Drone data requires to increase the current data governance policies due to the new risks related to the aerial data and operations and locations of drones. For instance, CIO needs to return to policies about:

• Reliability and security along the chain of custody
• APIs and source aviation system, access
• Risk mitigation and privacy
• Outdated Master Data Management flatten the differences in reference data such as asset type, customer name and location.
• Access control
• Documentation of source data for re-processing

Knowledge of new lexis

On integrating drone data, people should be familiar with common types of ‘processed’ data from drones but not raw data on producing imaging software in IT. For instance:

Thermography: Utilizes thermal video camera to perceive radiation in the long-infrared range of electromagnetic spectrum. Maintaining technicians and building construction can observe thermal signatures indicating heat leaks in thermal insulation and use results to enhance the efficacy of work. Thermal mapping is ‘the thing’ with vendors such as DroneDeploy providing live streaming views and be a map or image.

Orthomosaic: Aerial photograph correcting the uniform scale where photo has lack of misrepresentation as map. Basically, orthomosaic is combination of individual photos stitched together for making larger one. The important thing is that personal photos make orthomosaics having their georeference. Hence, processed data is the end users use it, but may know the location of source data essential for reference. On thinking about the data governance terms, revisit the data retention rules where images are required for assessing changes.

Video: Most common and difficult type of drone data. It is difficult as video is stored in compact form to decrease the file size for storage. The video file comprises of container format having video data in the format of coding along with audio data in the format of audio coding. It is known as CODECs. It is complex on studying the video data and sort the frame data.