Friday, May 23, 2008

TITAN the Proxy

Someone recently asked me:

"Could I have Image Web Server create an ECWP, have TITAN ingest the ECWP and then have TITAN create a WMS that could be ingested into ArcMap?...Kind of a way to get between barriers of different applications. In other words, TITAN would be a proxy.’"

This is correct. In general, TITAN empowers 3rd party applications to ingest any data that TITAN supports. For example, uDig doesn't read IMAGINE (.img) files, and Google Earth default is KML…In TITAN, many different file formats are transformed through a translation layer and can be subsequently loaded into a variety of applications like UDig, Google Earth, ArcMap, GeoMedia, AutoCad…the list goes on.

Consuming local geospatial data: generally speaking, data coming from different sources into TITAN is handled through an open source spatial bridge library called GDAL/OGR.

GDAL/OGR is responsible for abstracting the different formats and providing TITAN with a single representation for reading data and coordinate system information. To see the list of GDAL/OGR supported raster and vector formats go here: http://www.gdal.org. TITAN also supports KML/KMZ models which may contain DAE/Collada models as well. In August, TITAN will also tie into ERDAS IMAGINE libraries, increasing support for even more raster files (note: must have ERDAS IMAGINE for this to work). Also for August we’ve developed our own custom plugin for ECWP using the ER Mapper SDK, and it is really fast.

Consuming web services: The TITAN Client currently consumes WMS, WCS and ECWP. If you want to, say, load a WCS or ECWP into ArcMap: TITAN will transform the WCS or ECWP data into a WMS layer. TITAN can make any random LL request and the pixel data will be fulfilled in the request. This is how the WMS connector works. Other proxy actions:

  • WMS, WCS and ECWP consumed by TITAN can be loaded natively into the TITAN Viewer, with no translation
  • Loading a WMS layer through TITAN into a WMS compliant application: no translation is applied. It directly accesses the service using the existing URL.
  • Loading a WMS, WCS and ECWP layer through TITAN into an application that takes a particular format (i.e. Google Earth consuming KML): TITAN transforms that layer into a KML and then loads it into Google Earth

In August TITAN will enable users to search a catalog of web services (otherwise known as CS-W...think OGC and ERDAS Image Manager), discover and retrieve a list of map layers from the server, retrievable in both WMS and WCS.

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