LizardTech’s business is not only about compression ratios and lossless quality; it’s about making our customers’ jobs easier by providing the best GIS solutions around while still taking into account their current operations. While much of our team’s time during the last ten months has been spent building and launching LizardTech’s GeoExpress® and Express Server® software products, we’ve also worked (and continue to work) hard to ensure that these products remain compatible with other commonly used GIS software.

Based on your feedback, we know many of you manage workflows that include one or more pieces of Esri software and it is increasingly important for both LizardTech and Esri technologies to integrate seamlessly together. Supported file formats allow projects to run smoothly and make sharing data faster and more efficient. Everyone wins.

To that end, LizardTech has recently made available a free plug-in for interoperability between our Express Server and Esri’s server product, ArcIMS. Express Server 7 came on the scene in July offering exciting features such as added support for raster images encoded to MrSID Generation 4 (MG4™) format and the option to install as a 64-bit application. Now when used together, Express Server makes viewing images via ArcIMS up to 25 times faster!

We also offer free plug-ins that add support for MG4 raster data files in Esri’s ArcGIS Desktop version 9.3.1 and 10. Now Esri’s Arc users can harness the benefits of the new MG4 files that GeoExpress 8 produces, including support for compressing hyperspectral data allowing users to compress up to 255 bands of geospatial data.

You can download the plug-ins for ArcIMS, ArcGIS Desktop 9.3.1 and ArcGIS Desktop 10 here.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions for future releases, so thank you, and keep it coming!

We Lizards like to keep busy and we like to share the products we develop with the geospatial industry, because…well…geospatial users are just so appreciative! Hard on the heels of the release of Express Server 7, which can be installed as a 64-bit application and features support for MG4 imagery, LizardTech has unveiled the MG4 Plug-in for ArcGIS 10 Desktop.

MG4 was created to support multispectral imagery and alpha-band transparency, and it is the fourth generation of LizardTech’s MrSID format. It has been met with enthusiasm by both end-users and developers. And the new MG4 Plug-in gives users of Esri products support for multi- and hyperspectral imagery compressed to MrSID format within the applications they use every day.

And, it’s free!

Let us know what other products you’d like to see that would make your job easier. We take our customers’ feedback seriously.

You can download the MG4 Plug-in for ArGIS 10 Desktop here.

Glen Thompson and I were fortunate to attend the ESRI Developer’s Summit in Palm Springs last month. In addition to being a great excuse to get out of the rain here in Seattle, the Dev Summit provides a great opportunity to catch up with our friends from Redlands and see what’s new with ArcGIS.

Those who missed it can look over the presentations.

One way to think about an event like this is in terms of what’s cool and exciting and what’s getting the “business as usual” treatment. This year what’s cool and exciting is most definitely client-side web mapping. We’re talking Flex, Javascript and the newly released Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server. These were accompanied by cheering, contests, prizes and “Playful” (?) references to glitzy, “silverlighty” (get it?) applications.

There were no contests or prizes for the backend stuff on which Glen and I spent most of our time. Of particular note, GDAL is definitely on the rise here. GDAL is the open source project that (among other things) provides the ability to convert between raster formats. Principal maintainer Frank Warmerdam presented a technical session on “Custom Raster Format Support in ArcGIS through GDAL”. Guys, start thinking about migrating those Erdas Imagine / RDO extensions to GDAL. The writing is on the wall.

And, speaking of items that will eventually need migrating, I gave a short talk on “Implementing a Custom Image Server Raster Format.” It describes the technical architecture of the project and includes some server benchmarking work that we did in Seattle highlighting the impact of using Express Server with ArcGIS Image Server Extension.

ESRI is even hosting a video of the presentation.

Thanks, guys!

Last week, some of us went south to Palm Springs to escape the rain and enjoy the company of the crew from Redlands at the ESRI Developer Summit. Much of the conference has been blogged about elsewhere, but I did want to share my observations of the talk on OGC capabilities in ArcGIS Server 9.3.

Satish Sankaran, Yinqi Tang and Gary MacDougal gave a very exciting discussion and demonstration of ESRI’s implementation of OGC Web Services. The quick and dirty is that at 9.3, ESRI has exposed considerable out-of-the-box support for all three of the main OGC specifications and demonstrated interoperability using non-ESRI clients and servers.

It might be worth starting with a little background. For a long time, if you wanted to use ESRI software to access server-based data you really had two choices: use ESRI clients (like ArcMap and ArcCatalog) to access data served from ArcGIS Server or use a web browser client to access the data as a read-only image from ArcIMS. I’m setting aside any discussion of the (client side) Interoperability Extension, which requires an additional license and which I’ve never seen.

If you had another application which could really benefit from content in ArcGIS Server, that was an integration task. More specifically that was your integration task. Similarly if you had an ArcMap-based geo-processing workflow that could benefit from integration with a non-ESRI content provider, well, that was your problem too.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (of which both ESRI and LizardTech are members) exists to publish freely available specifications that allow geospatial applications to talk to each other. The three most commonly used OGC specifications are:

• Web Map Service (WMS) for serving custom maps into web pages. Typically these are small JPEG image “tiles” that make up your map.
• Web Feature Service (WFS) for serving features (vector data like roads, borders, pizza shops) from your dataset into another geospatial application that can interact with them at much more controlled level than a read-only map. Think of WFS is as serving GML over HTTP. An OGC extension for this is WFS-T (T for “transactions”) which allows remote editing of data.
• Web Coverage Service (WCS). Like WMS, this provides a means of accessing raster data. However, here the service is optimized for sending to another geospatial application, rather than a simple web service.

At 9.3, there is significant support for all of these.

WMS

ArcGIS Server’s WMS support is extended to the current version 1.3 including support for Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD). SLDs are part of the WMS specification and allow customized symbology for features. The demonstration here included an OpenLayers web page client rendering a map (with user-selected symbology) served from ArcGIS Server via WMS. That was pretty good, but really, only a marginal improvement.

WFS

The previous 9.2 Data Interoperability extension will continue to provide WFS support to the Desktop Clients. However, at 9.3, “Simple Features” support comes out of the box (without the extra license). On the server side, 9.3 includes a WFS server and if your back-end store is SDE then this includes WFS-T support. What that means is that if you use SDE, non-ESRI clients (who speak WFS) can edit your geodatabase. Stop for a minute and think about that.

The demonstration here showed again the Open Layers client. This time it accessed the parcel data stored in ArcGIS Server via WFS. It corrected some of the parcel boundaries and this was reflected in the same GDB accessed via ArcMap. Frankly, I was pretty impressed.

WCS

WCS support is totally new in 9.3. The demonstration of server support showed the Open Layers client rendering a 4-banded Modis image served from ArcGIS Server via WCS. More interesting to me was the client demo where ArcMap read a dataset via WCS from ICDES and did some sort of raster-based geo-processing on it (I can’t remember exactly what it was). Very, very cool.

Whether or not you believe “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa,” ESRI’s support for this sort of interoperability can only be seen as good news for GIS and for ESRI.