Laser-Scan Ships Gothic 4

Laser-Scan Ships Gothic 4

Laser-Scan UK has started shipping a major new version of its Gothic product family to its prestigious customer base. Gothic 4.0 is a commercial off the shelf (COTS) product that brings together a set of major advances that were initially implemented to suit specific customers. It blends these with a set of more general product developments and performance improvements that push forward the boundaries of geodata management.

The Gothic family is based around an object-oriented spatial database and toolkit, and includes the mapping and geodata production application LAMPS2, the Integrated raster/vector GIS called IGIS, the data capture application VTRAK, and the Integrator toolkits. National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) and large commercial mapping and geodata suppliers worldwide, trust Gothic to safely handle their valuable corporate spatial data through update, production and exploitation flowlines.

The established Gothic family already had capabilities way beyond those of most mapping and GIS systems. The Gothic database is versioned, handling explicitly the way that the world changes through time. It handles vast continuous datasets, with no sheet or tile boundaries. It is an object database, storing a model of the real world in a rich schema, which can handle the references and family relationships (a canal is both a transportation medium and a water feature). It dynamically builds and maintains topology (the knowledge of connectivity, adjacency and sharing). The objects have behaviours that are automatically activated to ensure data integrity, and which add intelligence to the map features.

Among the major advances in Gothic 4.0 are:

Support for stereo photogrammetry for 3D data capture, update, and visualisation, including close integration with SOCET SET from LH Systems.
Gothic Integrator: Java Edition (GI:JE) - a new API, toolkit and sample code provides access to the Gothic database and active spatial object functionality from a Java environment. GI:JE is well suited to building high-throughput web-mapping solutions. The new Java-callable O-O API allows easy programming of Java servlets and applets to present information in a geographic context, so crucial to modern e-business solutions.
A new FME Plug-in provides import and export from some 60 different transfer formats and spatial databases.
Undo/Redo of interactive edits allows easy recovery from mistakes, and simple trial of 'what if' scenarios, including complex topological interactions.
New editing tools, including 3D edit and warping of backdrop rasters
Improved DTM creation, including edge blend, validation, 3D visualisation and flood fill
New format and data model support, including military formats and XML.
Output to Adobe Illustrator (.AI) format for finalising in Illustrator or Freehand Scalability improvements to handle databases with thousands of datasets and versions
Performance improvements, particularly in attribute and spatial indexing, and in caching of recently accessed information.

Laser-Scan's Chief Product Manager Paul Hardy says, "Gothic 4 is a major step forward for Laser-Scan which has often been called 'the best-kept secret of the Geographic Information (GI) industry'. Many organisations are realising that it's the active object capabilities of Gothic that put Laser-Scan's products way ahead of the field."

About Laser-Scan
Laser-Scan is part of the Yeoman Group, an exciting information technology group, which bring together expertise in mobile navigation, mapping and communications. The combination of these capabilities puts the Group in a strong position to play a leading role in the future of Internet and location services based business. The Yeoman Group is listed on the London Stock Exchange Alternative Investment Market (AIM).