What is TerraCatalog?

In addition to its exciting new-and-improved capabilities, the upcoming TerraBuilder Version 6.0, features an effective means of organizing and managing your data sources. The new TerraCatalog component indexes all imagery and elevation raster sources and TerraBuilder projects found on your local and network drives, providing an integrated and unified view of all your data sources. TerraCatalog can link to your organization database to support multiple users or use a personal database for single user mode.

TerraCatalog not only stores links to your source and project files, it stores all geospatial and attribution information it retrieves from your raster files, such as coordinate system and metadata, as well as TerraBuilder related information, such as cache files and polygons. You can even view a preview image of your raster data using the TerraCatalog plug-in system.

TerraCatalog’s sophisticated search engine uses advanced textual and spatial search mechanisms so that you can quickly find the geographical data you want. Advanced management tools allow you to keep your data as current as possible.

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In our last few SkylineGlobe product releases, we invested a great deal of time and effort developing the interfaces between our products and other OGC open standards, products and data. We began by enabling our 3D client application (TerraExplorer) to add feature layers from OGC Web Feature Services (WFS) and raster and elevation layers from OGC Web Map Services. Next step was adding support for OGC KML and KMZ files. In the latest TerraGate 4.5 release, our OGC Compliant WMS and WFS enable you to share all your map image and feature data with any application that reads the standard OGC WMS and WFS protocols. Our latest TerraExplorer release features a significantly improved KML loader.

Naturally, development of these new features entailed significant resources and time on our side – invariably at the expense of other, seemingly more exciting features. So why, you may ask, are OGC open standards so critical?

It is true that for applications that manage all their data internally, open standards don’t provide any meaningful advantage but many applications today need to communicate with other data sources. Compliance with OGC standards insures interoperability.

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