James Fee has a nice rant on mapping interfaces today, but the part the piqued my interest was embedded in the screen shot of the National Map. It said "The National Map Viewer BETA: Powered by Palanterra X3"
Interesting! Who or what is this Palanterra X3 who have managed to get a top-of-the-fold "Powered by" on a major USGS site? Oddly, the Google is unusually terse about this topic. Looks like it's an NGA project, and yet it's "Palanterra (TM)". Intra-governmental entrepreneurship at its finest, a carefully imagined brand name that appears only in meeting agendas and powerpoints.
Friday, November 13, 2009
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4 comments:
It all becomes clear if you click on Help:
"Px3_TNM2Beta_15.1 [100720090159]"
Wow, that was helpful.
Palanterra was developed by ESRI for the NGA. It was relatively "cheap" for USGS because the Government already paid for it once.
From 2006: "Palanterra is a family of spatially and analytically enabled Web-based interfaces designed to describe, assess, and depict physical features and geographically referenced activities, referred to collectively as geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). Palanterra is designed around the integration of disparate stores of spatial data (via standards-based Web services [OGC, SOAP-XML, etc.] streaming binary, file transfer protocol, or direct spatial database connectivity) into a synoptic view--a common, spatially and analytically enabled operational picture."
http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc06/papers/abstracts/a2377.html
I was wondering the same thing. More here:
http://www.nima.mil/NGASiteContent/StaticFiles/OCR/Geo0704.pdf
"Private-sector vendors contributing to [the Homeland Support Infrastructure Program]
and Palanterra include BAE SYSTEMS, Boeing Autometric, DigitalGlobe, ESRI, Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions, Intermap Technologies, Leica Geosystems GIS & Mapping, NAVTEQ, ORBIMAGE, Space Imaging, Surdex, Vexcel Corporation, 3001, and more."
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