Nixon believes the ECW open standard image compression format will be widely accepted because it's the only large-image compression technology that has free software development kits for image compression and image decompression. A standard protocol is necessary to provide a common mechanism for interoperability among several geoimage Web servers. The Microsoft TerraServer supports more than 2TB of physical disk storage for the geoimagery data tiles. The physical disk storage requirement is reduced considerably using ECW-format imagery. The server demonstrates real-time roaming and zooming across a massive image database via the Internet.
Users can view imagery at a regional level or zoom in to see individual trees and cars.
Limited network bandwidth chokes the movement of large volumes of geospatial data from mammoth GIS databases. In this decade, increasing bandwidth has revolutionised the transmission of alphanumeric and simple graphic data, but given the insatiable appetite for high-resolution digital imagery and streaming video, serving imagery from Web servers will be a challenge well into the next millennium. GEO Asia Pacific Copyright 2001 by Adams Business Media . All rights reserved. View our terms of use and privacy policy .