MrSID Users Like What They See

ArcNews caught up with three MrSID users who shared their experiences. Below they talk about how their organizations use MrSID, the features they tested, and their thoughts on this exciting technology.

MrSID Helps Mecklenburg County Make GIS Data Accessible

Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, is one of the fastest growing counties in the United States. The Department of Engineering and Building's Mapping and GIS Services section is responsible for mapping and addressing all GIS-related products. GIS data collected by Mecklenburg County--except in rare cases--is considered part of the public domain due to North Carolina's Open Records law, so the data must be made publicly accessible for citizens as well as public and private agencies. In addition, it has been the County's goal to move GIS from a specialized application to an enterprisewide decision making tool.

The first step in doing this was to create an accurate photographic basemap to support all GIS-related projects. The County worked with Geonex Corporation, Chicago Aerial Survey Co., and Cartographic Aerial Mapping to acquire accurate digital grayscale orthophotos for all 538 square miles of the County. The digital ortho sheets were flown at a 1" = 1,000' scale. The 708 9" x 9" films were scanned to a one-foot to one-pixel resolution, producing files of approximately 23 MB for each sheet. Sixteen gigabytes of imagery, stored on 27 CD-ROMs, were delivered over the course of the 14-month project. With one hurdle down, the County faced another: making this large amount of imagery accessible to the County's many departments and the public.

Andrew Goretti, project manager for the Mecklenburg County Engineering and Building Standards Department, needed a way to provide this imagery to the 200 ArcView GIS users within the County, as well as outside vendors and the general public. During the 1998 URISA conference, Goretti got his first look at MrSID and liked what he saw. "I was so amazed at MrSID's ability to zoom and pan on a high-resolution image without slowing down the process," said Goretti.

"It's unbelievable. We now have the entire data set available on a single CD. We no longer have to shuffle through a pile of CDs to find the right tiles. Even better," Goretti continued, "MrSID's multiresolution feature automatically generates multiple image resolutions, eliminating the need for resampling. Now I can go from looking at the whole image set to an area of the source one-foot resolution with one click inside ArcView GIS."

Mecklenburg County's latest project has been the collection of 1999 color digital ortho data in TIFF and MrSID format for the County. "Once the data is completely in-house we expect to put MrSID to work again to mosaic the entire 538-square-mile data set, only this time with up-to-date and extremely detailed color imagery for use in all Esri software such as MapObjects, ArcInfo, and of course, ArcView GIS," said Goretti.

For more information please contact Andrew Goretti, project manager (tel.: 704-336-2831).

Louisiana-Pacific Corporation

You've got 12 GB of storage space on your server, and 90 GB of digital orthophoto quad (DOQ) data to store. Which would you rather do: add 78 GB of storage space to your server or find a more efficient way to store your data? GIS Manager/Analyst Raymond Sims at Louisiana-Pacific Corporation, one of North America's leading building products companies, was faced with this problem--how to fit 200 CDs of DOQ data into less than 12 GB of storage space. During a demonstration of LizardTech's MrSID Geospatial Edition at the 1998 Esri User Conference, Sims found his solution.

"We tested and eventually purchased MrSID, and with it compressed roughly 90 GB of DOQ data down to approximately 4.5 GB," commented Sims. "Before MrSID it was impossible to put the imagery out there without spending a substantial amount of money on hard drive space, but now we can do that with no problem."

Louisiana-Pacific's data consisted of digital orthophotos as well as digital raster graphics including USGS topographic maps that had been scanned. The data was put online so that Louisiana-Pacific's foresters, management personnel, and various other employees could use the images in ArcView GIS for day-to-day decision making and planning. The imagery is not currently available on the Internet, but is available over Louisiana-Pacific's corporate Intranet and is distributed to the field via CD-ROM.

"Our guys take the MrSID imagery for granted because they haven't known anything else," said Sims. "They've never seen a comparison because there isn't one. We chose MrSID because we had not seen any other product that could provide the level of compression that MrSID could without a loss of image quality. In addition to that, the partnership that LizardTech formed with Esri to make the MrSID format a standard, supported image format within Esri software was very important to us.

"Ever since I first saw MrSID's capabilities at last year's Esri User Conference," Sims continues, "I've been really excited about it. MrSID really has revolutionized the way we deal with imagery in the GIS world. For our corporation, it's the difference between providing this data to our users or not. We simply couldn't do it any other way."

Louisiana-Pacific, now in its 26th year of operation, is a major building products company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, with manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and in Canada and Ireland. Visit Louisiana-Pacific's Web site at www.LPCorp.com.

Seattle Public Utilities

MrSID is enabling Seattle Public Utilities to meet its goal of easier accessibility to geographic information while saving staff time and lowering their costs. For more information about Seattle Public Utilities' use of MrSID, see the article "Maps R Us" (Reprinted with permission from the October 1999 issue of Puget Sound Computer User magazine).

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