Express Server Case Study – State of New Jersey Office of Geographic Information Systems
Express Server provides State of New Jersey Office of Geographic Information Systems an easier, faster way of streaming orthophotos.
What we most like most about the Express Server product is its excellent performance and software stability.
John Macready
Geographic Information Systems Specialist
New Jersey Office of Information Technology
The State of New Jersey’s Office of Geographic Information Systems (OGIS) was founded in 2001. Its mission includes promoting the use of GIS technology among state agencies and providing online access to New Jersey’s orthoimagery and other data. Every five years, OGIS flies over the entire state of New Jersey to update the several sets of orthophotos archived over the past decade and a half. The image collection includes digitally captured 4-band GeoTiffs that have been reprocessed into lossless 3-band RGB and infrared tiles along with 3-band imagery scanned from film. It also includes 2006 MrSID county mosaics obtained from the USDA’s National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP), plus earlier infrared imagery. Finally, there were non-orthorectified black and white images from the 1930s, scanned from photos and georeferenced, as well as USGS topographic maps dating from 1881–1924 that were converted from scanned TIFFs. OGIS used GeoExpress 7, another product in the LizardTech™ Express Suite™ line, to create lossless JPEG 2000 files from raw data.
A portion of the shoreline at Atlantic City, NJ. The lossless JP2 image was created using GeoExpress and is served by OGIS via Express Server. GeoExpress and Express Server are part of the LizardTech Express Suite line of geospatial products.
This substantial archive amounted to over 900 gigabytes of losslessly compressed JP2 files stored on a SAN. OGIS needed an extensible solution which would provide easy access to this imagery as well as all future datasets for state residents, the GIS community, and the online public. This solution needed to enable WMS access to imagery from file-based storage for easy image management.
“The only product that met all of our criteria was LizardTech Express Server,” says Macready. OGIS is running two Express Servers which are load balanced for performance and reliability. Express Server is being employed in two public applications (Information Warehouse and Business Map) and is providing WMS services for other users who require imagery.
“We have been working with LizardTech for twelve months and we’re extremely happy with Express Server and LizardTech’s level of support,” says Macready. “When we had problems with integration into our existing environment, LizardTech was extremely responsive to our needs. What we most like most about the Express Server product is its excellent performance and software stability.”
