Product Overview: PCI Geomatics GeoRaster ETL for Oracle

Introduction:
PCI Geomatics is an image centric Geospatial technology company and focuses on satellite image processing and digital air photo data manipulation. PCI Geomatics started working with Oracle early on in the Oracle 10g product development cycle and helped Oracle define the GeoRaster technology requirements for raster data management. Because PCI Geomatics has extensive expertise in raster data format support and management, it made sense to develop a GeoRaster extract, transform and load (ETL) product for Oracle 10g. For many GIS users, raster is a mainstream way of doing mapping, especially among European geoscientists. In addition, government agencies that rely heavily on satellite data, such as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), store much raster data, and need both raster and vector data stored within a single database. Oracle has acknowledged this customer demand, and has made raster part of its data model.

Basic Product Functionality (Source: PCI):

• Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and Modeling tool for populating Oracle 10g Spatial Georaster enterprise databases
• Data ingest support for over 100 raster and vector formats
• Command line and scripting environment enable the Raster Loader to be integrated into production workflows, and used within batch process scheduling systems
• Includes user-friendly workflow - building environment for flexible, customized transformation workflows
• Metadata mapping wizard
• Includes pre-load transformations
• Available for Windows, LINUX, and Solaris platforms

Key Features (Source: PCI):

• Directly read from Oracle 10g Spatial and GeoRaster databases - open, view, select, and enhance any number of layers from an Oracle 10g database
• Generic Database (GDB) technology - directly read data from an extensive list of supported file formats.
• Modern interface - including a fully georeferenced file based viewer.
• Multiple image display - view any number of images, any depth ( 8 -, 16 -, and 32 - bit), any size, and any resolution.
• Data inspection tools - fast roam and zoom and new overview window.
• Image enhancement tools - improve the way your data is displayed.
• Image analysis tools - RGB mapping, numeric values display, and histograms.
• Attribute table display - view and query the attributes associated with your data.
• HTML online help - modern online help that's easy-to-use.

Product Details
Within the Oracle database, raster is now a data type and similar, in that respect, to the vector primitives that it currently supports. Oracle's GeoRaster is implemented as an object within any table in the database. Similar to a geometry object (vector); raster pixel data is stored as an associated table. Images are subdivided into tiles. Within each tile you can store bands of multispectral data. - by dimension and by band.

PCI’s GeoRaster ETL for Oracle product is a gateway to Oracle 10g. It provides access to the many formats that makes it an excellent supplemental tool for Oracle, which does not have native support for many industry standard raster and satellite file formats. Oracle 10g will support the importing of GEOTIFF or JPG files. GeoRaster ETL supports over 80 image formats. If original raster format has associated metadata, GeoRaster ETL supports image metadata to map to Oracle 10g. GeoRater ETL takes across associated metadata or other ancillary information such as a color look up table. GeoRaster ETL allows a process flow to Oracle. The user can run an image classification locally, inspect results, and do a batch ingest to an Oracle database.

Oracle 10g support will also be available in the next release of Geomatica as an extra cost plug-in or module. FreeView, available as a free download, is a flexible data visualization tool for viewing, selecting, and enhancing Oracle 10g spatial layers, including GeoRaster.