Wichmann VDE publishing house, Germany, selected Intergraph SG&I as the 2013 Innovation Award winner for best product. Competing with seven other vendors, Intergraph SG&I was nominated by an independent jury of five geospatial scientists and selected by a large margin of geospatial industry voters.
Intergraph submitted a Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution, which is based on Intergraphs’s high-performance, image-compression format Enhanced Compression Wavelet (ECW), designed specifically for geospatial imagery. The solution is supplemented with lightning-fast streaming via the Enhanced Compression Wavelet Protocol (ECWP).
An impressive example of these capabilities is the creation of the largest and fastest geofile of Germany, enabled by ECW/ECWP and Intergraph’s cloud infrastructure. The challenge for RWE AG, one of Europe’s leading utilities companies, was to handle a huge volume of data covering more than 365,000 square kilometers – the entire country of Germany. In particular, the question to be addressed: how to deliver 38 terabytes of imagery data for all of Germany at 20 centimeters ground resolution, spanning 370,000 files. In order to overcome the sheer volume of data, ERDAS IMAGINE was used to process and compress the 38 TB of uncompressed imagery down to a single ECW file with less than 1 TB, while retaining full image quality and excellent performance.
Today’s geospatial consumers expect instant data delivery. The highly effective lossless ECW data compression — with a compression rate of up to 95 percent, and the transmission and delivery of geospatial data via ECWP convinced the majority of voters. Intergraph’s reliable 24/7 DaaS solution manages millions of geodata files, produces one ECW source and provides multiple services like WMS and WMTS, including easy data distribution via Clip-Zip-Ship. It supports desktop, web and mobile devices, and reduces network bandwidth, IT resources and costs.
“The innovative, trendsetting solution and the combination of ECW compression and ECWP streaming puts the conventional, slow and memory-intensive process of mosaic imagery and image tiles far into the shade”, says Robert Widz, EMEA Geospatial Executive Director at Intergraph SG&I. “All in all the ECW technology marks a milestone in the Big Data issue”.
Intergraph congratulates fellow Hexagon company Leica Geosystems for being winner of the second prize with its innovation Leica Nova MS50 MultiStation, combining every significant measuring technology in one device.
For more information about Intergraph’s geospatial products, visit http://geospatial.intergraph.com/Homepage.aspx
