Leveraging geospatial data for various purposes across large, disparate organizations that span an entire country is a tremendous challenge, especially when geospatial data ownership is decentralized across states. Along with understanding how to share the data effectively, different departments within different agencies need to access and process data in a variety of ways. Organizing and keeping data up to date across jurisdictions, while delivering that data in a common way and timely manner, are all crucial factors in enabling national agencies and departments to make smarter decisions.
Octave and longtime partner GEOSYSTEMS Germany were awarded a project to help one of Europe’s leading electricity and gas companies – the RWE Deutschland AG – which sought to organize and manage geospatial data for the entire country of Germany, more than 365,000 square kilometers. One of the biggest challenges was handling the huge data volume. In particular, the question of how to deliver 38TB of imagery data for all of Germany at 20 centimeters, spanning 370,000 files, had to be addressed.
Along with understanding how to share the data effectively, different departments within different agencies need to access and process data in a variety of ways.
Along with understanding how to share the data effectively, different departments within different agencies need to access and process data in a variety of ways.
A comprehensive solution was built using a cloud infrastructure; Octave Alto Data Management (formerly ERDAS APOLLO), the geospatial data management solution providing the organization and rapid dissemination of massive volumes of disparate geospatial data; Octave Imagine (formerly ERDAS IMAGINE), which incorporates geospatial image processing and analysis and remote sensing; and Octave ECW SDK (formerly ERDAS ECW/JP2 SDK), which provides the central compression and decompression capability within Imagine and Octave GeoMedia (formerly GeoMedia).
To overcome the sheer volume of data, Imagine was used to process and compress the 38TB of uncompressed imagery down to a single 1TB ECW file, while retaining full image quality and excellent performance. With final pixel dimensions of 3,210,000 pixels x 4,340,000 pixels by 3 bands, or 14 terapixels in size, at the time this was the largest ECW image ever created and quite likely the largest single image of any format in the world. It is served in a variety of protocols, with automated updates, to multiple end-user systems.
