Product Overview: Keigan System's Keigan GRID
Related Product: Intergraph's GeoMedia GRID

Introduction
Keigan Grid is a collection of COM-compliant grid mapping and spatial analysis objects. It can be used to create custom spatial analysis solutions, or to expand and enhance existing products. Keigan Grid objects include of a number of Modules (dll) and ActiveX controls (ocx) that provide the capability to create, view, and edit grid layers and legends, translate between grid formats, and do grid-to-vector and vector-to-grid transformations. The key to Keigan’s product is the plethora of map operations that were formally adopted from Dana Tomlin’s Map Algebra. Keigan has responded to customer feedback and added analytic functionality beyond Tomlin’s original set of models. Some of Keigan Grid's newer capabilities include a set of hydrological modeling objects and a range of sparse matrix interpolation objects.

And because Keigan Grid conforms to the COM architecture, the user is allowed to select the pieces of that technology to build single executions of a customized solution. So this allows Keigan to share its technology with other development organizations to embed grid technology in vector systems. This is what it has done with Intergraph to create GeoMedia Grid. With GeoMedia Grid, first released by Intergraph in 2003, Keigan Grid objects were used to integrate grid capabilities within the GeoMedia environment. This new integration allowed users to easily move between the vector and grid “worlds,” using the tools and data that best meet their needs. In GeoMedia Grid 5.2 (to be released in November 2004), certain object components of Keigan Grid are included, and the interface to manipulate data is now entirely within GeoMedia to more tightly couple the two products, which had not been the case in previous versions.

Click for Larger Image

Basic Product Functionality

• Terrain processing
• Spatial relationship analysis
• Spatial data characterization and reporting
• Spatial statistical analysis
• Spatial image analysis
• Spatial modeling
• Overlay analysis
• 3D grid viewing
• Raster to vector conversion
• Grid to database connectivity
• Data visualization
• DEM manipulation
• Surface Data Tools
• Surface Profiling
• Volume Analysis
• Shaded Relief
• Isoline Generator
• Grid Data Tools
• Grid Layer Histogram
• Cell magnification pallet in map view
• Layer compositing and blending

Product Details
Keigan Grid's functionality focuses more on grid analysis and the company is quick to point out that it is not positioned as an image processing tool. The product contains a number of predictive modeling functions for operations such as flow modeling and network generation (terrain path) to determine watershed boundaries. These network maps is similar to a network map in vector, but each pixel contains information about how something would pass over that particular surface (See Figure at right). The result is a matrix of information about how to traverse over that surface.

Keigan Grid will also work directly with Oracle's GeoRaster, a new feature type supported by Oracle Spatial. With Oracle 10g’ the GeoRaster feature of Oracle 10g Spatial, a new data type, SDO_GEORASTER, is defined, and raster data is stored as a new data table with each raster grid or image stored as one GeoRaster object of this type. Keigan will use a combination of the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) and OCCI (a C++ interface) to gain access into the database. This gives them the ability to use the database structure, which Oracle has defined, for storing raster data directly into the database. Keigan Systems is currently developing an extension product for GeoMedia Grid called GeoMedia Grid for Oracle.

There is no compression of the raster data within the database at this time. Keigan, for example, has a compression flag associated with their data structure for GeoMedia Grid so that they can store the data in Oracle Spatial as either Keigan compressed version or a native version. Data will be stored as Oracle needs it to be stored in case other software tools that have built an API to Oracle GeoRaster need access to it.

Click for Larger Image