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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Welcome to (my) post zero.

In this blog, I will try to share with you thoughts, ideas, and experiences from our day to day work in Skyline. Innovations start from the environment you work in, so I will tell you a little about what's happening in the Skyline ideas factory. These developments are worthless without you, our users and integrators. Having the pleasure of being one of Skyline's frequent flyers (and I don't mean in TerraExplorer), I will also try – starting from this post – to highlight some interesting projects and events from around the world.

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Our latest release of TerraExplorer 5.1.2 introduced new support for the Time element. This feature allows you to define the life span of each object in the project by setting its start and end date and time. An object is only visible when the current project time is within this range. The current date and time can be modified through the new Date and Time slider displayed on the 3D window.

There are two ways to add time elements to objects. You can import KML or KMZ files that already contain the TimeSpan or TimeStamp tags. Or you can use the TerraExplorer Time Stamp tool to define start and end dates and times for selected objects or groups.

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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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For more than 12 years, Skyline has been one of the leading companies in the 3D-geospatial visualization and analysis arena. Throughout these years we’ve strived to set the industry standards, featuring new and revolutionary technologies, while also providing solutions for our customers’ day-to-day problems.

Our goal, in this Products and Technology blog, is to offer you a peek at some of our newest features that will soon be coming on the market. We’ll offer insights regarding relevant technological issues, and share some tips and tricks, courtesy of our professional services team. 
 
I will be authoring this blog, along with my colleague, Eylon Sirotkin. I’ve been with Skyline for 12 years and have managed Skyline’s Development and Support for the past five. Eylon heads our International professional services and support group.

I hope you will enjoy this new section of the Skyline web site and visit often to learn about all of the great things that will soon be coming your way. I recommend subscribing to our RSS feed to follow us in your favorite news aggregator application.