New South Wales Government - Department of Lands
Enterprise Image Register & Pixel
The Department of Lands (Lands) manages a large number of land-related images such as plans, maps and titles. Many of these were stored and managed in different environments, using different standards and technologies and required separate delivery mechanisms to make them available to Lands staff and the public. A requirement was identified to provide a single system into which image collections could be consolidated. This was primarily driven by Lands' ambitious scanning projects which urgently required a home for the millions of images that were being generated.
A project was instigated to build the Enterprise Image Registry (EIR), a single point from which eventually most Lands images should be retrieved. Images are registered in the system and enriched with business metadata to aid cataloguing and searching. The registry is made available to image delivery applications through a suite of services. It is generically designed so that different types of image can be registered and so that any business metadata can be set up for new image collections.
A web-based image delivery application called Pixel was also built. This allows keyword metadata searching for JPEG2000 images which are then streamed for viewing, panning, zooming and printing.
The core of the EIR is an Oracle database. This is wrapped in a Java data access layer which is utilised by a suite of services. These in turn are consumed by Pixel and by other image delivery applications. Images are delivered by Pixel using ERDAS Image Web Server. The database holds 8 million images at the end of 2008 but this may grow to 100 million over the coming years.
Business analysis, Technical and Project management skills:
This was an Ajilon project with whom we partnered. Our responsibility was as follows:
- Business & technical analysis
- Business requirements
- Technical architecture/design
- Wire-frame screen layouts
- Functional specification
- Design of system Interfaces
- Logical and physical data models
- Design and implementation of data migration & imports
- Testing
- Initial planning and estimating
- Management of up to 5 programmers
- Vendor management
- Budget management
- Full responsibility for the project, reporting to a steering committee