RaveGeo Enables Geodata On-demand in Finland

Finnish organisations are first to use a new, truly on-line service for geographic data. The new on-demand geoservice is provided by the Finnish high-tech company Karttakone. The service is based on the compression and streaming technology RaveGeo from Idevio (Sweden).

In the past high class vector based geographic information has been too demanding to serve on-line, due to data size and complexity. Thanks to this new compression and streaming technology, on-demand delivery is now possible.

The service is true on-line, unlike other services where data is just downloaded and stored locally or others that are too slow to use in a realistic case. In Karttakone Karhu the data is fed directly to the users’ workstations from server. This means data is always current and no manual work with copying from CD and DVDs. In addition the service is also faster than if the data was stored locally.

The enabling technology behind the service is RaveGeo. The service encompasses the RaveGeo Server and clients components for ArcGIS from ESRI. The data is compressed approximately 10 times and made available in a wide scale range, which make the service both efficient and rapid.

The new service is provided and implemented by Karttakone, Idevio’s partner and reseller in Finland. The subscription-based service is currently available to ArcGIS users, other platforms will follow. The Karttakone team has a unique position in Finland with long experience, very skilled developers and a deep understanding of Geoinformatics.

The service contains data from the Topographic database produced by the National Land Survey of Finland; which is a very large, accurate and high-resolution database. The database provides details down to street and house level with almost complete coverage of Finland. The service can also be used with other vector data sources.