Newsletters
LizardTales Newsletter – December 2005
From The CEO
Dear Customers and Partners,
This is our last LizardTales of 2005, a very interesting year for our company in which we have had major news on the corporate side after merging with our sister company Extensis, as well as exciting product and technology news.
So what has kept us busy the last few months? On the geospatial imaging side, the proposal submitted to OGC by LizardTech, Galdos and other partners for GML in JPEG2000 was finalized and is about to be endorsed by OGC as a standard, so expect our products to support it in coming releases. GML has been long associated with vector data but this standard will bring the advantages of GML into the realm of geospatial imagery and will certainly play a key role in improving imagery interoperability and management. We have also announced that ESRI is integrating MG3 support for the latest version of ArcPad to help both ESRI and LizardTech customers such as the Fire Management Office at the Bureau of Land Management improve their image workflows by reducing the number of actions they need to take to access imagery and decreasing the time it takes to perform mission critical operations – something at which MG3excels.
On the document imaging side, I want to let you know about some of the activity coming from the Far East during the last month, since there are many interesting things happening there. Our Korean office, the former Janusystem team that joined Celartem in April, has announced that Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance, one of the largest insurance companies in Korea, has adopted DjVu as part of a company wide effort to reduce the amount of paper they use. Similarly, our parent company in Japan, Celartem Technology, has announced that, in collaboration with PFU (Fujitsu), they have developed a DjVu-based virtual storage system that has been adopted by Shiseido, one of the largest cosmetic manufacturers in the world, in an effort to reduce the amount of paper being used at their company. Both Samsung and Shiseido recognize the importance of reducing paper use and managing documents to improve the efficiency of organizations and that DjVu is today the best solution for achieving that goal efficiently.
I wish you all a very happy new year and look forward to continue supporting you and providing continuous innovation to help you manage your growing collection of imagery.
Best regards,
Carlos Domingo
President and CEO
Celartem Inc.
GeoExpress
While the MrSID® (SID) file format has long been the de facto standard for geospatial imaging, the adoption rate of JPEG 2000 (JP2) as an ISO standard for wavelet imagery is accelerating. Although JP2 is designed for use in myriad applications and workflows, the lack of a defined geospatial metadata standard for JPEG 2000 files has been a limiting factor, until now.
In November, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) officially adopted the GMLJP2 standard proposed by LizardTech and Galdos along with other organizations. GML (Geography Markup Language) is based on XML and will be used to define rich geospatial metadata within a JPEG 2000 file.
With the release of GeoExpress 5.0 last year, LizardTech has provided the ability to compress imagery in your choice of either the MrSID format or JP2 format. Now that the GMLJP2 specification has been adopted, LizardTech will be adding functionality to GeoExpress that will include the ability to define GML metadata when creating JPEG 2000 files using standard GeoExpress workflows.
Express Server 5.2
This month, LizardTech is releasing Express Server 5.2, the latest update to LizardTech’s solution for rapidly serving high quality
aerial and satellite imagery over the Web via high- and
low-bandwidth connections.
This update to Express Server provides improved support for the OGC’s WMS (Web Mapping Service) standard. This open WMS standard allows for increased interoperability between Express Server and other third-party WMS-enabled applications, making it even easier to work with large datasets of imagery in whatever GIS application you choose!
Document Express
In Ireland the Local Government Computer Services Board (LGCSB), a public sector organization closely aligned with local government, has recommended the use of LizardTech’s Document Express software and DjVu technology to support the encoding of public information that is available via the local Irish governments for the citizens. In 2005 to date 10 local Irish government authorities have purchased multiple licenses for encoding their public records for public access. This makes the Irish local governments the biggest organizational user of Document Express to date.
Where is LizardTech?
Events in North America: ESRI Federal User Conference Location: Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C. Date: January 31- February 2, 2006 The ESRI Federal User Conference provides a forum for sharing information on geographic information system (GIS) software, data, solutions, and services that support work in the federal GIS community. The conference brings together users, developers, project managers, and senior-level managers from across the federal government. Events in EMEA and APAC: DGI 2006 (Defense Geospatial Intelligence) Location: QE II Conference Centre, Westminster, London Date: January 23-26, 2006 DGI 2006 is the annual European event for the military geospatial intelligence community, bringing together government, industry, and military leaders together with leading suppliers and industry experts. Complete schedule of LizardTech events
Employment Opportunities
LizardTech and Extensis are seeking great talent. To learn more about current opportunities, please visit:
