Mexican Navy supports national protection initiatives with Erdas Apollo

ERDAS announces that the Mexican Navy is now using ERDAS APOLLO to manage and serve geospatial imagery and data in support of its national protection initiatives.

Since 1941, the Mexican Navy has carried out the presidential mandate to oversee and safeguard 11,000 kilometers of Mexican coastlines, navigable inland water bodies, and the territorial sea and maritime aerial space. Geospatial information is crucial for operations supporting that mandate.

The Mexican Navy imagery warehouse includes hundreds of terabytes and thousands of images. Imagery and derived products are acquired and produced daily. In early 2007, the Mexican Navy was struggling to keep its imagery catalog up-to-date. Additionally, it was under pressure to make sense of the increasing variety and quantity of imagery products being delivered and respond to growing internal and external demands for that data.

Officers of the Mexican Navy worked closely with MAPA, the ERDAS Distributor in Mexico, to find a solution. Mexican naval officers are long time ERDAS IMAGINE (remote sensing) and LPS (photogrammetry) users, and also have deep experience in relational databases and GIS. With this level of experience in image processing and cartography, they had a very clear understanding of what was required.

After careful technical evaluation, it was determined that ERDAS APOLLO met the needs and strategic IT requirements of the project. Available in three tiers, ERDAS APOLLO is an enterprise-class data management and delivery system enabling an organization to describe, catalog, search, discover and securely disseminate massive volumes of data. ERDAS APOLLO seamlessly integrates with existing GIS environments, leveraging business systems and supporting almost any kind of data input. The solution is also supported by ERDAS ADE, an integrated suite of products enabling real-time editing of an enterprise’s spatial and non-spatial data in an Oracle database via the web, desktop or mobile devices.

One of the key reasons for selecting ERDAS APOLLO was the level of integration possible, and the ability for end users to discover and access secure web services in existing applications. ERDAS APOLLO enables seamless data delivery into the various desktop applications in use across the Mexican Navy, including ERDAS IMAGINE, LPS, ArcGIS, MapInfo, AutoCAD, Gaia and a variety of web clients, to name a few.

The Chief of the Department for the Imagery and Geospatial Information Division of the Mexican Navy said, “For the Mexican Navy, ERDAS has provided a technological tool to improve, modernize and facilitate the current competence regarding the handling of enterprise geographic information used for planning operations. The ERDAS solution is a complete workflow. Satellite imagery processing and analysis is performed, including geometric corrections, advanced processing and multispectral analysis both in 2D and 3D environments. Then the solution enables the administration, management and dissemination of massive volumes of information. Through all of this, we are now well equipped to provide Navy Commands with accurate and reliable geospatial information for operation development and decision-making support.”

With ERDAS APOLLO in place at the Mexican Navy, end users have seen a significant improvement in image delivery and the ability to easily integrate geospatial information into their applications. They also now have the means to engage in higher levels of geospatial collaboration.