Newsletters

LizardTales Newsletter – April 2007

From the General Manager

Jim White

Dear Customers and Partners,

Recently we sent out a survey to our customer base; I expect that many of you reading this document also recently received the survey from us. We had an excellent response rate to the survey and I would like to thank all of you who participated. It is important to us to gather feedback so that we can continue to create products that meet the needs of our geospatial customers. I want to share with you some points from the survey that I found interesting. High on the list of responses to the question “Which of the features in GeoExpress do you take advantage of the most?” was color balancing. I am pleased that such a new feature to GeoExpress has so quickly found its way into our customers’ workflows. I was also pleased to find that we already had ongoing research projects for three out of the top four responses to “What features would you like to see in GeoExpress?”. I expect that in future articles I will be able to announce new offerings that tie directly to the feedback from the survey. Finally, in response to the question “Would you recommend GeoExpress to someone else in the industry?” I am pleased to report that 88% responded yes. While that figure is 12% lower than what we ultimately hope for, I’m gratified to receive such an affirmation that our efforts overall are finding approval among the community we design products for. We value the effort you took in providing us with feedback and we will be using your responses to continue improving our products and services in ways that are important to you.

Best Regards,
Jim White


Geospatial

Spatial ExpressLizardTech Spatial Express, a plug-in for Oracle Spatial that adds support for storing MrSID and JPEG 2000 imagery in a database, has been well received by our partners and customers. Finally, users are able to store large raster datasets in their databases, just like they’ve been doing for years with feature data. However, because up until recently it’s been impossible to store large raster images in a database, some people still wonder why they shouldn’t just continue storing images on a file system.

This is understandable, of course, since storing even small geospatial images can take up lots of space and have historically been unwieldy to work with in a database. Databases have traditionally stored images as BLOBs (Binary Large OBjects), which essentially puts all of the image data into one record of a database. Because of this, even if you wanted to view only a tiny piece of a very large image, you had to decode the entire dataset, which takes up lots of processor resources, lots of memory, and most regrettably: lots of time. Workarounds to this have been available for some time such as pyramiding, where images are pre-processed at different magnification levels and then split apart into individual tiles. This means that the portion of the image you want to view can be retrieved quickly, but it also means that you must now store all of those individual tiles in your database, which again takes up a lot of space. Furthermore, the amount of time needed to generate these pyramids can be immense, sometimes weeks or even months.

Spatial Express solves this problem by customizing the database so that images are stored natively in either the industry standard MrSID or ISO standard JPEG 2000 format. Because Spatial Express uses the native wavelets for storage, the imagery no longer has to be treated as a BLOB. Every scene, whether it’s 200 pixels square or 20,000 pixels square, can be viewed quickly and easily, even coming from source images that are hundreds of gigabytes in size, because Spatial Express just decodes the pixels you need. Of course, since the images are stored as MrSID and JPEG 2000, they don’t take up much space, typically only 1/20th of their original size. Best of all, there is no need to pyramid the data, so you can load your imagery in quickly. If your database has Spatial Express installed, you can even use your GeoExpress software to load your images into your database as part of your encoding workflow! Learn more by visiting the Spatial Express Homepage or by contacting one of our sales representatives.


Where is LizardTech?

We will have a presence at the following shows this coming quarter:

California GIS Conference
April 4-6, 2007 - Oakland Convention Center, Oakland, CA.

Tennessee GIS Users Conference
April 17-18, 2007 - Chattanooga Convention Center, Chattanooga, TN.

The Washington State Chapter of the Urban Regional and Information Systems Association (WAURISA)
April 23-25 - Lynnwood Convention Center and Trade Center, Lynnwood, WA. LizardTech Booth #2.

ESRI Annual Southeast Regional User Group Meeting
May 2-4, 2007 - Hyatt Regency, Jacksonville, FL.

ASPRS 2007 Annual Conference
May 7-11, 2007 - Marriott Waterside Hotel, Tampa, FL. LizardTech Booth #211.

GeoTec Event 2007
May 14-17, 2007 - Calgary Telus Convention Center, Calgary, AB, Canada.

Joint Services Environmental Management Conference (JSEM)
May 21-24, 2007 - Greater Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, OH.

Twenty-Seventh Annual ESRI International User Conference
June 18-22, 2007 - San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA. LizardTech Booth #601.

Complete schedule of LizardTech Events.


Customer Wins and Case Studies

This quarter we added another customer success story showcasing the benefits our geospatial products bring to our valued customers.

The Québec Ministry of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks promotes sustainable development while protecting natural ecosystems. The Ministry annually receives 10,000 aerial images of provincial territory in color and greyscale, which it uses for ecological analyses. The Ministry installed LizardTech GeoExpress to convert GeoTIFFs to industry standard MrSID format and Express Server to distribute the imagery among its offices and field personnel for use as image layers in ArcMap and WMS-enabled web applications. Now, personnel anywhere can quickly view any of the Ministry’s image data from one central, easily updated repository. You can read the entire case study by visiting our case study page.

We would also like to share with you recently added clients to our ever expanding customer base catalog:

North America
Petroleum Geographics Mapping
Digital Globe, Inc.
Conoco Phillips
Morris-Murray Aerial Photogrammetry & Surveying Services (MMAPSS)
John Deere
Canada Department of National Defense
Michael Baker Jr. Corp.
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Woolpert
Clark County GIS
City of Del Ray Beach
Carolina Aerial Surveys, LLC
Thomas and Hutton Engineering
Cooper Aerial Surveys
Oregon Dept. of Forestry
State of Utah – Automated Geographic Reference Center
Core Software

In addition to the hundreds of applications that already support MrSID, Trimble recently released a new version of TerraSync that supports MrSID Generation 3 (MG3)! Learn more by visitinghere.


Promotions

Now through April 30, 2007 we are running a GeoExpress promotion. When you purchase 1 copy of a GeoExpress encoding bundle or GeoExpress Unlimited, you will receive a FREE copy of GeoExpress Tools (a $1,500 value) OR a FREE floating license (a $1,000 value). As with everything else in GeoExpress, the choice is yours! To take advantage of this limited offer, contact your sales representative at 1-866-725-5211 or 206-652-5211 orgeosales@lizardtech.com.


Tips and Tricks

This is a new segment of our quarterly newsletter. Each quarter we’ll offer a practical tidbit about how to perform a certain task or achieve a certain result using one of our software products – a tip or trick you might not be aware of that we hope you’ll find useful.

This quarter, save time by using the Optimize feature in GeoExpress. Here’s how:

The Optimize feature in GeoExpress offers special options for repurposing existing MrSID Generation 3 (MG3) files quickly. If you have an existing MG3 image you can use the optimizer to save time when recompressing, resampling, cropping, and using area-of-interest encoding.

Optimizations can be done very quickly because they are performed in “wavelet space” on already encoded images that remain encoded. The time involved in decompressing an image to alter it and then reencoding it is eliminated.

To use the optimizer, click the Optimize tab on the left, then select Project > Add MrSID image to optimize.

IMPORTANT: These features are available for flat files and for composite MrSID images provided that they were originally encoded as ‘optimizable’ (encoded with the Optimizable checkbox selected).


Employment Opportunities

LizardTech is seeking great talent. To learn more about current opportunities, please visit: Jobs at LizardTech.