LizardTech, a division of Celartem, Inc., the providers of software solutions for managing and distributing digital content, recently announced that the OGC, the international geospatial industry consensus standards organization, has officially adopted the GMLJP2 standard proposed by LizardTech and Galdos Systems and a consortium of leading aerospace and geospatial technology companies.
GML, a Web-authoring language for delivering and displaying geographic data over the Internet, is based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and will be used to define rich geospatial metadata within a JPEG 2000 (JP2) file. This new standard will also drive cross-platform interoperability and rapid Internet distribution for geospatial imagery, enabling customers to quickly and easily disseminate massive geospatial imagery by providing a consistent image format that is vendor independent.
“GMLJP2 opens a whole new application arena for GML, and enables the standardization of various kinds of satellite and aerial images,” said, Ron Lake, CEO of Galdos Systems Inc. He added, “This will have a significant impact on geographic data collection worldwide.”
Since the GMLJP2 specification has been officially adopted by the OGC, LizardTech is well underway to developing products to support the addition of GML metadata to JP2 files and provide LizardTech customers more flexibility and interoperability with their geospatial images. The new products are scheduled for availability this summer.
Additionally, this opens up opportunities with future LizardTech products as GMLJP2 can support not only basic image information, but also geographic features, coverages, and topology, enabling new workflows such as using GML to specify which three bands a multispectral image should display depending on the application that opens it, or using sensor model information embedded in the GML to determine how an image should be rendered.
