A method for controlling a drone includes receiving a request for information about a spatial location, generating data requests, configuring a flight plan and controlling one or more drones to fly over the spatial location to obtain data types based on the data requests, storing heterogeneous data captured by the one or more drones and creating spatio-temporal indices for identifying spatial or temporal coverage gaps in the data necessary to answer the request, controlling the one or more drones to fly over the spatial location to obtain a plurality of data types from the identified spatial or temporal coverage gaps and extracting and analyzing data to answer the request.