What is the future of IWS-based application in the emerging knowledge-based society?
Only four years ago, if someone had suggested to me that it would be possible to roam and zoom over TB size images, in real time, using ordinary modem based internet access, I would have flatly said it is technically impossible. Yet today, the Image Web Server does all this, and more. The logistics involved in providing access to imagery suddenly becomes much simpler. Consider a city department with a 200GB image mosaic, covering a city, that is to be provided to the city’s 5,000 GIS, CAD and environmental engineers. Even compressed, this would be a 20GB image file. Previously, this would entail cutting thousands of CD’s to provide the imagery to individual users – who each would have to have enough disk space locally to store the image. With the Image Web Server, the city can simply store the image on a web server, and serve the imagery out to all the users, directly into their respective applications. As a result, there has been a radical change in the way people use and think about
