MGT 7-1.indd - KMI Media Group

The Carbon Project has announced
the Gaia Support Package, which enables
customers to engage Carbon Project engineering
staff to address specific extensions,
changes and enhancements to its
Gaia and CarbonTools products. This
new support package is in response to a
worldwide surge of activity in developing
spatial data infrastructure based on Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards.
To help its growing user community
address new and specific needs, the
Carbon Project is providing a direct
channel to the developers behind its products.
The Carbon Project’s Gaia geospatial
viewer is built using the CarbonTools
PRO toolkit and is fully open source to
CarbonTools PRO customers. Developed
as part of the National Spatial Data
Infrastructure Cooperative Agreement
Program, Gaia 3.2 provides a robust
Service Level Change Provides
Advanced Satellite Imagery
GeoEye, a premier provider
of satellite, aerial and geospatial
information, has finalized
a service level agreement (SLA)
modification to the company’s
existing NextView contract
with the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency (NGA). The
value of the SLA is $12.5 million
per month for a period of one
year. GeoEye will provide satellite
imagery products to NGA under
this agreement beginning with
the commencement of commercial
operations of its GeoEye-1
satellite. GeoEye-1 is undergoing
final calibration and alignments.
GeoEye expects to start selling
GeoEye-1 products soon. The
18 | MGT 7.1
Package Supports Spatial Data
Infrastructure Development
and open API that allows programmers
to develop Gaia Extenders with
or without a CarbonTools PRO license.
The Gaia Extenders are light, easy
to deploy and can alter Gaia’s
functionality.
Jeff Harrison
jharrison@thecarbonproject.com
SLA also includes imagery from
the company’s IKONOS satellite.
The contract, together with
GeoEye’s recent modifications to
its business model for international
commercial affiliates, will
enable the company to be much
more operationally responsive
in meeting the imagery requirements
of the NGA through its
NextView program. The program
is designed to ensure that the
NGA has access to commercial
imagery in support of its mission
to provide timely, relevant and
accurate geospatial intelligence
in support of national security.
Mark Brender
brender.mark@geoeye.com
Grid-Computing Solution
Aids Terrain Map Creation
Lockheed Martin has
grid-enabled its TOPSCENE
mission rehearsal applications
using the Digipede
Network from Digipede
Technologies, a software
provider of grid computing
solutions for the Microsoft
.NET platform. The grid-enabled
version of TOPSCENE
will soon be installed at the
Naval Strike Air Warfare
Center at Naval Air Station
Fallon, Nev., resulting in a
dramatic increase in the speed
and throughput of complex
calculations required to
produce accurate terrain
maps for three-dimensional
scene creation. The Digipede
Network is an affordable
distributed computing solution
built entirely on Microsoft
.NET that dramatically
improves the speed and perfor-
mance of demanding realworld
business applications.
Integrated with Microsoft
SQL Server, Visual Studio,
Windows HPC Server and
other Windows Server products,
the Digipede Network is
radically easier to buy, install
and use than other grid-computing
solutions. The Digipede
Network is the only grid-computing
solution certified for
Windows Server 2008. Using
the Digipede Network, businesses
can easily achieve the
benefits of grid computing,
including improved IT agility
and increased application
scalability. Developers can
write .NET or COM applications
that will take advantage
of hundreds or thousands
of computers, bringing the
power of grid computing to
the Windows platform.
GSA Contract Offers
Simplified Imagery
Acquisition
The General Services Administration (GSA) has
awarded SPOT Image a contract to sell SPOT satellite
imagery and related products and services to federal,
state and local government agencies at pre-negotiated
rates. Offered under the GSA Information Technology
(IT-70) Schedule, the new SPOT contract greatly simplifies
and accelerates the acquisition process for the
multitude of government entities that rely on satellite
imagery and derived products. Government users of
geospatial information will find that nearly the entire
catalog of SPOT products has been offered in the GSA
contract, including new and archived 2.5 m–20 m standard
SPOT images in a variety of scene sizes, geo-coded
and ortho-rectified SPOTView custom mosaic products,
Reference 3D data sets, Digital Elevation Models,
SPOTMaps off-the-shelf mosaics, and vegetation data.
The GSA offering also includes some special processing
services as well as new and archived imagery from the
Taiwanese FORMOSAT-2 satellite.
Jessi Dick
dick@spot.com
www.MGT-kmi.com