CORPORATE UPDATE
PCI Geomatics Retools

By Paul Siegel

After two years of restructuring, retooling, and additional software development, PCI Geomatics has brought something new to the geomatics world market. The makers of EASI/PACE, OrthoEngine, ImageWorks, SPANS, PAMAP and ACE have spent their time attempting to evolve their corral of geomatics software products to meet what they claim is an unanswered demand for a single, integrated product, one that basically tries to do everything.
      Additionally the company has also developed a very accurate IKONOS model that allows customers to use OrthoEngine to orthorectify Space Imaging's most basic Geo product at a fraction of the previous cost and time required. PCI Geomatics also recently announced that they were increasing their market presence in Europe with new agreements with three geomatics corporations: SICAD Geomatics, RapidEye AG, and Delphi2 Creative Technologies (soon to be called Definiens).
      But the latest product to emerge from the PCI development cocoon is Geomatica. Anticipated for several months and officially unveiled at the ASPRS show in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, Geomatica represents a fundamental change in how PCI Geomatics envisions professionals and non-professionals will perceive the geospatial sciences in the coming years. Geomatica was originally designed to be a complete geomatics solution for photogrammetrists, remote sensing users, GIS operators, image processing specialists, and cartographers. This meant that developers had to establish not only how to merge technologies from successful products for interoperability, but also how to present the product so that it efficiently met the needs of each geomatics market sector. As spatial data and remotely sensed images become more popular in other economic sectors, Geomatica developers have also had to consider an ever-growing range of users.
      David Stanley, vice president of R&D at PCI Geomatics, said, "Remember that we accomplished all this in under two years. This was no easy feat, by any measure. We spent a great amount of time looking ahead to see what all types of users will want to accomplish when using geospatial information and our software."
      Before committing to their new plan, PCI Geomatics enjoyed a significant slice of the geomatics market share. PCI Geomatics management wanted to make sure that they anticipated all possible circumstances before beginning this integration. But why take the leap at all? Peter Hazlett, design coordinator for Geomatica, has been the muscle behind the developmental momentum of this project. "Our products have always been considered by the market as advanced and complete in what they do, but it was clear from our analysis several years ago that the geomatics market was about to evolve in the new century. We simply needed to be ready."
     What they were readying is a product that has merged and improved upon their most successful technologies. The company has essentially blended EASI/PACEª, SPANSª, PAMAPª, ACEª, and OrthoEngineª to develop a completely new framework for Geomatica. This has been done with an eye to producing a single, integrated product with strengthened raster and vector processing capability, all in anticipation of meeting the expanding needs of the remote sensing, GIS, cartographic, and photogrammetry worlds.
      As part of their product rollout plan, PCI Geomatics is introducing Geomatica in three phases. Phase One, Geomatica FreeView, was made available in May 2000. Geomatica FreeView is a new viewing environment that works with a variety of data, including imagery, vector, and ancillary. FreeView allows the viewing, enhancing, and examination of remotely sensed imagery such as LANDSAT, SPOT, RADARSAT, IKONOS, ERS-1, NOAA AVHRR, and aerial photography. Users can employ FreeView to integrate GIS data with imagery and view the associated attribute data. Key features and benefits include a fully georeferenced file-based viewer with modern graphical user interface (GUI) and the ability to view any number of images at any bit depth, at any size, and in any resolution. Also included is the ability to directly access a large number of image and GIS formats through PCI Geomatics' GDB (Generic Database) technology, powerful vector support, tools for fast image roaming and magnification, enhancements, numeric value display, and attributes table display. And best of all, Geomatica FreeView is free.
      Phase Two, Geomatica GeoGateway, is a smart-data translation tool that includes a viewing environment for working with a variety of data including imagery vectors and ancillary data. Geomatica GeoGateway includes translation functionality for over 80 imagery, vector, and other data formats as well as reprojection and subsetting tools. Also included is read-and-write support for Oracle 8i Spatial with Oracle GeoImage data management. Geomatica GeoGateway will be available in the summer of 2000.
      Phase Three, Geomatica Prime, is destined to become the company's flagship product. Geomatica Prime includes the new viewing technology of Geomatica FreeView and Geomatica GeoGateway, both with full GDB capability. Also included are proven batch modeling, image correction, and access to over 300 image-processing algorithms. Over time, the components and GIS algorithms from SPANS and PAMAP products will also migrate to the Geomatica suite. Geomatica Prime is designed to include all of the important elements needed for accomplishing most tasks in remote sensing, GIS, and cartography. Its emphasis is on ease of use, multi-resolution data handling, automation, extensibility, and the ability to integrate Geomatica with other technologies. Additional modules include advanced capabilities for remote sensing, GIS, cartography, photogrammetry, DEM, and web server.
      The added attractions available in Geomatica Prime include full vector topological support with multiple-layer viewing and updated editing functionality, full cartographic map production functionality with native windows printing, histogram and scatterplot tools for additional analysis, profile generation, and image processing functionality that includes image classification and digital elevation model (DEM) editing.
      Geomatica will introduce a new online help system that replaces the older, text-based helper documentation. More user-friendly online help is now offered in HTML format, using the system default Internet browser. This is the company's first effort at HTML online help development. The ability to incorporate graphics, tables, and diagrams into online help is light-years ahead of the old, simple-text help function. PCI Geomatics recently hired additional documentation and education personnel, illustrating the company's commitment to helping customers get the information and training they need. According to John Molendyk, manager of documentation, education and quality assurance, plans are underway to bring more assistance information and graphical tools to the customer. "We've made great advances over the past eight months in how we document our software. Our next step will be to build upon our online help successes and begin developing interactive learning tools such as online presentations, computer-based training, downloadable demo kits, and live demonstrations hosted by educational professionals."
      Early results have shown that Geomatica has the potential to deliver on its promises to be powerful, extensible, customizable, integration-capable, web-enabled, and database oriented. This last point has garnered special attention from such international software giants as Oracle Corporation. The result of this attention is that Geomatica offers support for Oracle8iª Spatial, as does the full suite of the PCI Geomatics product line. Oracle8i Spatial is the leading technology for spatial data management. Designed specifically as an Internet development and deployment platform, Oracle8i technology is a high-performance, multi-threaded platform for serving up distributed databases in multi-user environments. This means that Geomatica's growth will parallel the capability to provide enterprise-wide geospatial data warehousing solutions. Oracle Spatial allows users and application developers to seamlessly integrate vector and raster data into enterprise applications, while fully leveraging the scalability, reliability, and performance of the Oracle8i Internet Platform.
      Geomatica provides direct integration with Oracle Spatial's geo-image management capability through PCI Geomatics' Generic Database (GDB). The GDB is a PCI Geomatics technology that allows programs to uniformly access data in more than 80 geomatic file formats, without first having to translate them before using them within various applications. This includes access to imagery, vectors, attributes, projections, and other auxiliary information of interest to users of geomatics software. Supporting Oracle 8i Spatial, including Oracle GeoImage, is unique in the market place, making geospatial imagery much more accessible to a wider range of users.
      Introducing Oracle technology into Geomatica and other PCI Geomatics technologies, addresses many of the spatial data management issues that are faced by geographic, scientific, and technical professionals worldwide. Geospatial image-receiving stations, distribution centers, service bureaus, and in-house organizations that run GIS applications face growing image-data management challenges that outpace the capabilities of simplistic flat-file cataloging systems. Distribution centers face challenges in image-data loading, batch preparation, efficient volume management, version management, and subset definition and distribution. Satellite and airborne image capture systems, ancillary down stations, and distribution centers have a substantial backlog of images waiting to be loaded into management systems.
      "GEOMATICA represents a major step towards consolidating a broad mix of geospatial technologies under one user-friendly hood, and providing an underlying interoperability framework for integrating the technology of others," according to Harry Niedzwiadek of Image Matters. "PCI Geomatics is taking a real leadership position in the industry by producing such highly interoperable technology."
      The future of Geomatica will see an effort to further customization capabilities, as well as a continuous integration of new functionality. OrthoEngine, PCI Geomatics' ortho-rectification product, may eventually be incorporated into Geomatica. ILWIS algorithms will find a home in Geomatica, as will their related GIS functionality, no later than the middle of 2001.
      Paul Lenson, R&D director in Richmond Hill, Ont., says he is optimistic about how fast Geomatica development will progress over the next few years. "There is a real need for a complete geomatics software solution. Although still very early, we have already received many favorable evaluations along with numerous suggestions and improvement ideas.
      This only motivates us further."
      PCI Geomatics will continue with their plans to develop web-based technologies for geomatics applications over the Internet. After experiencing successes with their SPANS WebServer, the PCI Geomatics executive has admitted that the company will eventually transfer this technology into a Geomatica WebServer. PCI Geomatics has regularly incorporated JAVA into the company's base code, and they have successfully produced a prototype JAVA image server.

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