NRGS Geospatial Blog

For anyone keeping up I mostly Babel about ESRI products or I drone on about GIS meetings in and around  the southeast.

Let me bore you with some info about ERDAS Titan.

Everyone is getting into the server market these days. Sometimes I think we are about two decisions away from rolling out a VAX solution to a GIS. ESRI has ArcGIS Server – ERDAS is rolling out Apollo for images – ESRI has ArcIMAGE server that may or may not be tied back into ArcGIS server (I’m pretty sure it is).  Both of the companies have a rich history in mapping and both solutions have merit. GIS needs a server component – GIS’s essence is in the server side of life. My biggest issue with server components is that all of my customers currently don’t deal with a server since they are all too small. For them life is about getting accurate data and sharing that data with customers and clients. they aren’t big enough to be able to afford a typical server solution. My forestry clients need a server solution – but they can’t afford one.  So I’m always on the lookout for something to make life a bit easier.

Titan is a bit deceiving – it looks simple. Simple is generally good but over the course of a few years I’ve come to expect complicated from my software.  The good great thing is that its – not complicated.  The interface is easy to navigate. The backend is not complicated (once you see what it does that makes it all the more impressive in my opinion). I may have some of this wrong so bear with me. Titan is a component that ties things together – or ties data and people together. The entire server-side package by ERDAS is known as a “TITAN Server Solution”.  I’m going to dwell on the Viewer/client portion here and stay out of the realm a TITAN Server Solution, but just so you know at the core of it is a GeoHub. All the users participate and share data over a GeoHUB. Counties/Gov’t Agencies/Whoever. The GEOHUB allows users to interact with one another and share data

Titan is a free download. It has that “Google Earth” look and feel and that is about where the comparison stops for me. This is much more than a Google Earth Clone.

So hopefully you’ve clicked on the image above. You should notice three things right off:

1. You have data viewing and annotation tools
2. You have a data viewer
3. You have an instant messaging component

So for the briefest of run downs. Titan will allow you to display data – currently shapefiles, kmls,  and ERDAS Imagine files in the viewer.  I know – No big deal.  So if you go over to the Instant Messenger Component and add the data (second icon from the left) and then you start to see what it can do. The data can be with one right click loaded into Titan’s Viewer, Microsoft Virtual Earth, or Google Earth.  If you also notice in your right clicking you can also create a WMS service that can be shared with any GIS  application that can view a WMS – like ArcMap.  So to try to throw it all into one screen shot.

So I took some data from a project I’ve been working on added it to the Titan Viewer from the Instant Messenger component.  From there I published a WMS that I can view in ArcCatalog (or Arcmap). Say that I’m sitting in a large corporate environment and we have Titan loaded (which I did at one time and we didn’t). If I’m working on a project and someone two buildings  over wants to use my data  I can load it into Titan and they can see it. Say they are working in Arcmap and need to see it – I can publish it out as a WMS.  I Instant message them and let them know what I’ve done and discuss the data with them. So if you just think about it – you’ve set your data free to an extent. Of course it would be nice if an organization had everything loaded centrally and access wasn’t a problem – I worked in an environment that had an enterprise GIS and nothing was centrally located. There was always data on someones PC that I needed – this would have saved alot of frustration, time, and money.  Is it the perfect answer? I have no idea but it’s headed in the right direction.  Check it out – it’s a free download. Once downloaded you can practice/work/play off the ERDAS server to get a fell for how it all starts to pull things together.

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Randal Hale Erdas Erdas