See the Webinar Here

Roger Longhorn of GEO:connexion attended the first TITAN webinar on Thursday September 25. He has written a review about what was presented, as well as posted the link to play the webinar: http://www.geoconnexion.com/geo_news_article/ERDAS-TITAN-Webinar/4387.

The webinar link is: https://erdasevents.webex.com/erdasevents/lsr.php?AT=pb&SP=EC&rID=1118387&rKey=CD2648A78BC12F1C

Running the TITAN Client in Linux

TITAN is about sharing data and even brings a lot of the DNA from social networking websites into the realm of geospatial data sharing. The value of a social network lies in the number of people who are able to access it and participate in discussion. Linux OS is frequently used for a variety of scientific applications which produce geospatial data. So given these facts we wanted to see if the TITAN Client would run on Linux, and begin to include the community of geospatial people using Linux on the client side.

The short answer is yes, the TITAN Client will run in Linux, but it has a prerequisite. In whatever distribution of Linux you have running, you will need to have access to the Windows API within Linux. The most common way to do this is to have Wine (http://www.winehq.org/) installed. Wine is a translation layer that has been around since 1993 and allows Windows programs to be run on a Linux machine natively, not through an emulator which usually affects memory and processor usage. You can get more information about Wine from its official website, Wine HQ. There you can find instructions on how to get Wine running on your Linux machine and also how to install Windows programs through Wine, which you’ll need since the TITAN installer is Windows-only.

We went through that process using the Ubuntu distribution of Linux and successfully got TITAN running, which you can see in the screenshot below.


The process was pretty painless, which we were expecting since most of the libraries used to build TITAN originated in Linux. If you’d like to see TITAN running in Linux, but don’t want to take the time to install Linux on a spare computer, we’ve provided a virtual machine instance of the same Ubuntu Linux we used to install TITAN. To run this, you’ll need to install either VMware Player or Server (which you can download or get more information from here - http://www.vmware.com/products/player/) and download the virtual machine from our FTP Server. If you have access to an FTP client, you can go to ftp.nvs-inc.com and log in with the user name and password of "titan." If you want a direct link to the file, you can use ftp://titan:titan@ftp.nvs-inc.com/TITANLinux.zip. The file is compressed down to 952 mb and takes up a little more than 2 gb when it's completely uncompressed, so it will take a while to download and also take up a pretty big chunk of hard drive space.

Once you’ve downloaded the zip file and extracted its contents, double-click the file named Ubuntu.vmx and VMWare should start up. You may be asked if you moved the Virtual Machine (VM), say “yes” and everything should load up just fine. The login user name and password for Ubuntu are both "user." There’s a shortcut on the desktop to start TITAN, so double-click that and you’re using TITAN in Linux (you’ll need to provide your TITAN login credentials, though).

And if you have any doubts of TITAN running in Linux, here’s a bit of trivia: the TITAN developer is named Lennox, so it should automatically work anyway. Next, we’ll try and get TITAN running on a Mac!

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This article was co-written by Joel Lawhead and Joel Herr of NVision Solutions, Inc.

Joel Lawhead is the CIO of NVision Solutions, Inc. and has been involved in GIS since late 2000.

Since 2003, Joel Herr has worked for NVision Solutions, Inc., first as a GIS Analyst and currently as a GIS Specialist. He works heavily in analysis, training, production, and web application development.

NVision Solutions, Inc. is a small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned certified 8(a) firm specializing in advanced geospatial solutions and powerful web applications. NVision Solutions, Inc. has also assisted in several ERDAS TITAN installations and has selected it for use in emergency management and disaster recovery. NVision is headquartered at the Stennis Technology Park in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. For more information about NVision Solutions, Inc., visit www.nvisionsolutions.com.

Map Collections, Server Side...

Via a TITAN GeoHub, organizations can now provide web service layers as maps to their subscribers via Map Collections.

The GeoHub Admin can add layers from WMS, WCS and ECWP to the Map Collection, and can provide access to ERDAS Apollo Image Manager (EAIM) catalogs of data exposed as web services. The Admin can also add web service layers and datasets that are published by the subscribers themselves, with permissions on those datasets maintained.

In an autonomous network, the Master Server Admin is enabled to provide layers from WMS, WCS and ECWP sources in a Map Collection as well. Beyond that, Master Server Admins can create custom tiled versions of imagery and terrain datasets for delivery from standard web servers to TITAN Clients participating in their network. They can pre-process their own basemap imagery for faster streaming of data via a custom TITAN Tiled Basemap, and can also generate a TITAN Tiled Terrain source, a custom tiled version of a terrain source which can be streamed to clients on a block by block basis.

Ultimately it’s the users that benefit from these sources of data, with more selection for basemaps and terrain for their TITAN Viewer.

Upgrade!

The ERDAS TITAN Network was upgraded last night to ERDAS TITAN 2009! This means that your ERDAS TITAN Client will have updated too with great new features!

I am also pleased to inform you of the upcoming release of ERDAS TITAN 2009 (version 9.3) server products, including ERDAS TITAN GeoHub, ERDAS TITAN Master Server and ERDAS TITAN Web Cache Servers, which will be available early September.

Here's what's new in the ERDAS TITAN Client

• ERDAS Apollo Image Manager (EAIM) Catalog support for authenticating with and querying, discovering and accessing data as web services from ERDAS Apollo Image Manager (EAIM) Catalog.
• Data format support is extended for a select set of ERDAS IMAGINE raster formats and sensor models, available when ERDAS IMAGINE 9.3 is installed on the same machine. Support includes NITF and also TFRD (TFRD when Defense Productivity Bundle is also installed).
• Localize the TITAN Client to different languages. The TITAN Client comes equipped with a Translator Tool for any language, and is now already localized for some languages.
• Utilization of Basemaps and Terrain: GeoHub Admins can designate different sources of basemaps for their subscribers, and Master Server Admins can designate different sources of basemaps and terrain for network users. So, TITAN users may now utilize different sources of basemaps and terrain in TITAN Viewers!

And more....

• ECWP faster implementation, for fast reading of ECWP.
• Proxy file load for direct data load into ERDAS IMAGINE Viewer
• TITAN Viewer Layer panel redesign shows data owner and permissions.
• The TITAN Viewer now supports KML with color styles, placemarks, geometry, regions, stylemaps, and network links.
• Uniform styles management across applications
• Right click to create one web service with all the layers a user is sharing, or just with a selected file.
• Search results include private data and KML
• Password management
• Band combinations may be adjusted for raster datasets in the IM, for individual or multiple datasets at a time.
• Disable 2 standard deviation preference
• Start IM in tray preference so that TITAN starts minimized to the tray when Windows starts.

Get the download here. Work is still being finalized on a new ERDAS website, and currently the redirect is still to our former incarnation 'Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging' for now.

New Movies and Papers

See new movies and links to white papers about TITAN in the column on the right (of the ERDAS TITAN Blog). The movies show a lot of detail regarding what is to come in the August release of TITAN!

Four Seconds to Save the World (ERDAS TITAN 2009)

Join me on September 25 at 11 am or 8 pm EST to learn about exciting new features in ERDAS TITAN 2009!

Register here: Four Seconds to Save the World

ERDAS TITAN 2009 rapidly enables multitudes of stakeholders to publish and consume geospatial data and location-based content in one online, collaborative network. When every second counts, users can consume data from multiple public and private sources into a variety of virtual globe, internet and rich client applications. This webinar will highlight this timely, unique permission-based tool, illustrating support of additional services and interoperability with ERDAS IMAGINE^®, ERDAS Image Web Server, ERDAS APOLLO and ArcGIS.

Using Shared TITAN Layers with ArcGIS Server

In an earlier post, it was mentioned that ERDAS TITAN could be used as a proxy to bypass the limitations of data ingestion within many geospatial applications. This tutorial will attempt to demonstrate this idea. For this tutorial I decided to share data from a TITAN Client on my workstation to the TITAN Client on my ArcGIS Server machine. I did this so I could go through the complete process of consuming published datasets as well as being able to pull the TITAN WMS URL for that data into ArcGIS server and serving it out as a web application. This process let me control all aspects of the data I published, but the process will work for any published layer in TITAN.

Why is this useful? Using TITAN to publish datasets as WMS and then consuming and ultimately publishing them into a web application with ArcGIS Server decentralizes the data. For example, the traditional method of creating a web application entailed pulling data from a central server or database. With the WMS layers being provided by any TITAN user, no data needs to be stored locally on the server itself. You can directly consume the WMS layers into ArcMap and publish the map document you create from them.


Additionally, the speed of sharing and publishing the data via TITAN relieves you of data transfer time and storage needs, since you are accessing the data from someone else’s TITAN instance. Since TITAN creates the WMS URL by default, you only have to copy the address rather than write a custom application or have an in-depth knowledge of the WMS specification.

The first caveat is that a TITAN Client must be running on the same computer/server that ArcGIS Server is installed. This is a “must” because TITAN serves out WMS layers through a localhost address, so trying to access the WMS that resides on a separate workstation from the server will not work.

To start, I loaded the data I wanted to share into TITAN on my workstation. Figure 1 shows the datasets that I published in the Geospatial Instant Messenger. I’m logged in with my personal username (i.e. see ‘jherr’ at the bottom of the IM) in this case and I’m accessing our NVision GeoHub. The data visible in this Instant Messenger screenshot are some county-wide layers we use in various projects. The original data format, as you can see, was a shapefile. The first layer is an accurate road network and the second layer holds building footprints from 2006, just following Hurricane Katrina.

Figure 1 - Data loaded into TITAN

Next, I set the permissions for the two datasets to public so people could actually see what I was sharing. In this case, I just defaulted to setting both layers to Public (figure 2).

Figure 2 - Setting permissions for shared data

After the permissions were set, I set the styles for each layer. This step is more of a personal preference as I wanted to control how the layers would display on another user’s system. For the roads I made the lines black and as thin as possible. For the building footprints, I set the layer to fill the polygons with a light orange color and border them with a darker orange.

Figure 3 - Setting the styles of the layers

These first three steps are standard tasks when adding data into TITAN, nothing really out of the ordinary, but I wanted to document them as part of this tutorial process. The following set of steps is the real meat of this tutorial. At this point everything is done on the server machine that houses ArcGIS Server. Also as a prerequisite, ArcGIS Desktop should be installed on the machine for reasons that will soon become evident.

The first thing I did on the server install of TITAN is find the shares and get the WMS URL of each. You can do this by right-clicking on the shared layer and choosing “Copy WMS URL.” If you were to paste this link somewhere, you’d see that the address starts with http://127.0.0.1:8090. This is the reason TITAN needs to be on the ArcGIS Server machine, because the 127.0.0.1 is synonymous with “localhost” and cannot be accessed from a different computer.

Figure 4 - Getting the WMS URL on the server TITAN

The next step is to pull this WMS layer into ArcGIS. You can do this a couple of ways. One is to open ArcCatalog and add the layer into the GIS Servers area of the table of contents (toward the bottom of ArcCatalog’s contents). In there you can click Add WMS Server and it will prompt you for the WMS URL. Paste the URL you copied from TITAN and click the Get Layers button. You should see the information about the WMS layer. When you click OK, it will be added to your GIS Servers. You can change the name to something more meaningful if you’d like. I left it as the default.

Figure 5 - Pull the WMS layer into ArcGIS

At this point the WMS layer is now usable by ArcMap. If you want to bypass using ArcCatalog to connect to the WMS, you can do that through ArcMap by going to Add Data and scrolling down to GIS Servers in the Look In: dropdown box and selecting Add WMS Server. From there the instructions should be the same as above. I added some layers into ArcMap that cover the same area as my WMS layers. I then added the WMS layers that I had into ArcMap and made sure that everything displayed correctly. You could open an empty map in ArcMap and only add the WMS layers and it should still work correctly.

Figure 6 - Use WMS in ArcMap

Figure 7 - View WMS in ArcMap

Once you save the MXD with the WMS layers in it, you can publish it as an ArcGIS service. I published it through the ArcGIS Server Web Manager. For the resource type, choose “map” and browse to where you saved the MXD and give the service a meaningful name. Mine is titled “titan_wms_and_basemap.”

Figure 8 - Publish ArcGIS Service

Now that you have an ArcGIS map service, you can build a web application using that service. In the ArcGIS Server Web Manager, choose to create a web application, name it and give it a description if you’d like, and add the services you want in the web application. I just added the service I created with the WMS layers in it, but you can add more if you have some in mind.

Figure 9 - Add map service to web application

Continue through the wizard until your web application is finished. It’s not completely done yet, though. You will need to deploy the web application to make it viewable in a browser (and to the public as a result). Find your web application in the list and click the check box. Now click Deploy at the top and your web application will deploy after a little bit of processing. If you now click the web application name, it will give you a web address that you can click to see your newly-completed web application. Figure 10 has my example.

Figure 10 - Check out your web application

If you want to view my working example ArcGIS Server Web Application, click here: http://vmserver.nvs-inc.com:8399/titan_test/.

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Since 2003, Joel Herr has worked for NVision Solutions, Inc., first as a GIS Analyst and currently as a GIS Specialist. He works heavily in analysis, training, production, and web application development.

NVision Solutions, Inc. is a small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned certified 8(a) firm specializing in advanced geospatial solutions and powerful web applications. NVision Solutions, Inc. has also assisted in several ERDAS TITAN installations and has selected it for use in emergency management and disaster recovery. NVision is headquartered at the Stennis Technology Park in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. For more information about NVision Solutions, Inc., visit www.nvisionsolutions.com.