We have been chasing our DOD and its National Image and Mapping Agency
(NIMA) for nearly three years.
About a year ago after many months of effort we were able to essentially win
a DOD-NIMA technology search known as Pathfinder. Pathfinder was a
multi-million dollar hunt for spatial multimedia solutions. We did this
with out own whit's and use of MapX technology
(http://www.redhensystems.com/vms). MapInfo was not a great help during
this process although several individuals in Troy encouraged our efforts -
thanks Mike and Andy!
I offer the following as a review.
Recently I re-contacted MapInfo regarding our DOD and Pathfinder win. I was
told that for any DOD/Oracle issues we needed to contact Brian Lantz. Our
VAR manager said Brian can best assist in determining the individuals and
resources necessary to support you and your/our opportunity. Brian has been
with MapInfo a long time and opened MapInfo's Federal office in Washington,
DC. Currently he is mostly dedicated to Oracle things in general and due
his background with the Federal effort, is the right guy for any Federal or
governmental Oracle connections. I would call him the MapInfo/Oracle
"expediter". Another live-wire technically is John McCarthy who is a member
of the MapInfo Oracle Team as well and is involved with most, if not all,
NIMA opportunities.
As far as I can determine 8i is very likely the only database that could
support the massive imagery and other "raster" formats used by our DOD and
likely NATO. The rumor we get is NIMA is a BIG Oracle 8i user. Can we
store and recall TABed rasters in it?
Dealing with Oracle is very confusing. Its such a powerful environment with
seemingly endless add-ons and features I have yet to sort it out. And by
the time you do sort it out the next release changes just about everything
you learned.
What I have discovered is there are 8i Enterprise Data Cartridges (index
systems) for: images, video, audio, very large text objects, and what they
call locator or spatial. These "objectized" cartridges revolutionize the
traditional database. They are individually complex and are only
integrateable via an Enterprise scale 8i. Interestingly, as of the 29th of
July Oracle apparently includes a scaled down interMEDIA that is a
all-in-one "Jr" version of these larger data cartridges.
"Oracle interMedia, shipping with the new Oracle 8i release of the database
server, builds on the Internet capabilities of 8i, combining the forces of
audio, video, text, image, and locator technologies to help customers manage
their important digital assets."
For images in particular interMEDIA suggests:
"Support for reading tiled TIFF images, and updated implementation of JPEG
compression for TIFF files; and'
"Enhanced JPEG support (new setProperties method support for progressively
encoded JPEG images)"
And Oracle as of 7/29/2000 says that:
MapInfo Professional is a client-server solution that uses Oracle Call
Interface to connect to Oracle 8i; an example of a traditional SQL
connectivity used by developers who seek highly efficient connections with
the Oracle server.
Similar to MapInfo Professional, MapX uses client-server OCI connection with
Oracle 8i to "edit and display spatial images".
MapXtreme is the new generation product from MapInfo which utilizes 100%
Java to connect to Oracle 8i. In version 1.1, MapInfo provides a snap-in
component called a data provider which connects to database via JDBC. In
version 2.0, the data provider module in MapXtreme will be moved into the
database as Enterprise JavaBeans.
Has this answered your questions? Not. I spent two hours digging this out
as I too am interested in answers to your questions. As you can see there
is no direct path - other than maybe mapinfo-l. Best might be to simply buy
the "Evaluation" CDs for like $99 and try it yourself or maybe Brian or John
can answer this?
http://www.nima.mil/
MidNight Mapper
aka Neil
7/29/00
-----Original Message-----
From: Alim Kucukpehlivan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Saturday, July 29, 2000 6:02 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: MI Questions for a military tender..
Hi There,
It had been a long time... I hope all is well..
this is the first of a series of questions:
1. There is a tender for Military, I am looking for Nato Symbol libraries...
(all kinds TTF or CAD based, or GIF)... Any hints wellcome...
2. Does anybody know that Oracle 8i Spatial can store Raster maps? or how we
can load raster maps on Oracle and serve them to MapInfo clients, along with
other vector files.
Best Regards,
Thanks in advance,
Alim Kucukpehlivan
Managing Director.
MapInfo Partner in Turkey.
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