When illegal structures violate strict building codes, intruding even into some of the world’s most familiar landmarks, what is cash-strapped Greece to do? For their Ministry of Environment, the ability to monitor rampant code violations outstripped its budget, not only in its historic capital city of Athens, but across the country.

They turned to our partner, TotalView, for help. The challenge: develop a rapid and cost-efficient way to identify structures that violate building requirements.

Proving those violations often means seeing evidence of change in structures over time. What Greece needed was a deep archive of architectural imagery, accessible at scale, and tuned for change-detection. Which is exactly what our satellite constellation has been capturing for the last 16 years, and exactly what TotalView used to help Ministry officials quickly determine violations.

Now the Ministry can cost-effectively identify code violations anywhere in Greece, to better preserve the architectural integrity of the Birthplace of Democracy.

“Orbital Insight is building a macroscope,” says James Crawford, founder and CEO of the pioneering AI company. “A device for seeing large-scale things—countries, continents, the entire Earth—while still seeing the detail.”

A tool that can count the trees and see the forest. A tool that unleashes Orbital Insight’s machine learning on DigitalGlobe’s GBDX platform, our unprecedented archive of 16 years of the highest-resolution, most data-rich satellite imagery ever captured.

And he’s using it to discover insights previously unattainable: counting cars to predict retail sales, monitoring plant health to forecast corn yields, measuring cities to calculate their growth. Mapping poverty. Assessing oil supplies. Tracking deforestation.

All at scale, worldwide.

GBDX’s on-demand, cloud-based platform is helping Orbital Insight understand our planet as never before. Just imagine what you could do with it.

PEMEX, Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company, struggled for years to manage imagery for its operations. Across departments and across the country, its internal GIS databases were unaligned, outdated, or even missing. Often, only paper maps were available to field personnel.

Upgrading to a more robust system was vital for better interoperability and monitoring of field assets. To fully leverage available satellite technology, PEMEX chose Spatial on Demand, DigitalGlobe’s oil and gas solution that seamlessly integrates the latest energy-specific datasets with the leading web-based mapping applications.

For PEMEX, connecting to one centralized service put current images where they were needed, made sharing of data automatic, and reduced expenses for project management, mapping, and planning staff.