CARIS, a leading developer of marine GIS and hydrographic software, announced today the release of Spatial Fusion Enterprise (SFE) 5.2 as part of its well known Ping-to-Chart™ product suite.

SFE is Web-enabling technology for geospatial information that aims at leveraging the investment of collecting and maintaining data by making it more visible and accessible to stakeholders. Web-mapping has been around for more than a decade and recent trends indicating an increasing awareness of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) have resulted in a growing need to Web-enable and share marine and hydrographic geospatial information.

There is an increasing need for organizations around the world to display their data assets on public and internal Web portals allowing users to interact with the data and integrate it with other data sources. It is this need that has driven CARIS to deliver the SFE product with the Marine SDI market in mind.

CARIS Ping-to-Chart™ products such as Hydrographic Production Database (HPD) for chart production and Bathy DataBASE (BDB) for bathymetric management can communicate with SFE using specialized Web services. SFE 5.2 can take full advantage of these enterprise systems and display their contents as intelligent information layers that users can view, query, and combine with other information such as Google Maps™.

In order to share data amongst various organizations it is essential that geospatial systems are interoperable. SFE utilizes the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc.® (OGC) standards to share geospatial information with external GIS systems and also to integrate data from other organizations and sources.

SFE 5.2 offers advanced tools to let the user identify, select, and extract data directly through the Viewer interface. Users can also query industry standard metadata about the data layers to discover their source.

Although several new features and possibilities have been added for the end-user in SFE 5.2, CARIS has also ensured that the backend administration of the system is very user friendly. With a basic setup from installation to deployment, you Web-enable your data in a very short time!

Visit booth E605 at Oceanology International to see a demo of SFE 5.2 and learn how it can be leveraged to provide new opportunities for your organization.