From The General Manager

Dear Customers and Partners,

We at LizardTech are following a number of workflow trends, feature requests and new technologies that will impact the arena of geospatial image transmission and storage in the future. Among them are a move towards open standards, a move towards Web services, an increased reliance on wavelet encoded imagery, increasingly distributed network environments, and increased use of databases for storing imagery. Taking a closer look at these trends provides insight that helps us map our product development efforts to the emerging requirements of geospatial imaging:

• Imagery Availability and Usage - Geospatial imagery is becoming widely available at higher resolutions and lower prices than ever, thanks to the adoption of digital airborne cameras, initiatives like USDA NAIP (National Agriculture Imagery Program), which makes imagery of US counties at high resolution available for just $50 per county, and the investments of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) into commercial satellite companies. In conjunction with these public-sector activities, new consumer offerings like Google Maps/Earth and MSN Virtual Earth are raising the awareness of the usefulness of geospatial imagery to convey information.
  

• Open Standards - GIS product offerings are supporting more and more standards-based formats and service APIs, such as the wavelet-based technologies and Web services being defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).
  

• Wavelet Image Compression - Wavelet encoding technologies continue to be the dominant image compression formats for geospatial imagery. Commercial tools are able to rely on widely-available, robust libraries for complete encode and decode support for wavelet encoded image formats, and related emerging standards such as GMLJP2 are providing needed geospatial metadata support. The result will be that more and more data compressed using wavelet technology will be available and used.
  

• OGC Web Services - Major commercial GIS packages have recently added, or are now adding, support for OGC web services such as Web Mapping Services (WMS). Companies on the leading edge are starting to talk about advanced uses for the Web Coverage Service (WCS) for imagery and the Web Feature Service (WFS) for other geospatial data.
  

• Open Source - GIS tools increasingly make use of open source components within their architectures. This is especially noticeable with open source projects such as MapServer and PostGIS, and also within the leading ranks of the developer community and their wide acceptance of GDAL.
  

• Image Databases - Large collections of image data (multiple terabytes) may require multiple servers, complex metadata indexing, and efficient I/O strategies. Furthermore, these datasets will start to move from single repositories to loosely federated datasets distributed across the Internet.

In response to these trends and in anticipation of ways we can better serve our customers, LizardTech is developing offerings that will take advantage of these trends and the technologies behind them. One of the things I'm most excited about is the prospect of an image server built to satisfy the open standards of OGC Web Services - a server that uses wavelet encoding technologies such as JPEG 2000 and JPIP as its internal storage and exchange formats and is designed for distributed and even peer-to-peer environments.

This image server will offer several compelling advantages for the geospatial community over what they find in the market today. Most obviously, wavelet encoded imagery enables significant reductions in storage and bandwidth requirements. But its benefits go even further; the use of wavelet encoded image formats for native storage within a database means more efficient management of data archives and associated metadata. It can also reduce expensive transcoding requirements. Open standards and public Web services enable this imaging infrastructure to work within both existing and emerging geospatial ecosystems.

For LizardTech and our customers there are significant advantages to be gained by embracing these trends. Preparing for changes in the geospatial community's expectations and workflows enables our customers to better serve their own end users and positions us well to retain our leading role in the world of wavelet image technology.

All of us at LizardTech are pleased to continue providing the highest quality imaging products and services to the geospatial community, and I personally look forward to interacting with many of you in the months ahead.

Best Regards,
Jim White