42 TB across three tiers
Twenty years of orthophotos, ten years of panoramas and oblique imagery, and three years of point clouds and meshes, split across fast storage, standard storage and archive.
Three suppliers, one viewer
Existing material from three previous suppliers taken over and set up, so the municipality no longer opens a different system per source.
Served on through WMS and WMTS
The imagery is not locked inside the viewer: standard protocols put it straight into Kaartviewer, dgDialog and QGIS.
The municipality of Barneveld had its imagery spread across three different suppliers. Panoramas with one, oblique imagery with two others, aerial photography somewhere else again. Each supplier brought its own viewer. The question was not to capture anything new, but to take over the existing material, host it and open it up through a single cloud viewer, with both a test and a production environment.
The weight of this collection is in the air. Twenty years of orthophotos in ECW, including the licences needed to serve that format legally, and ten years of oblique imagery in JPEG with a shapefile per year. In the viewer the orthophoto sits in the overview, and from the same location you step through to the oblique shots, the street level panoramas and the point cloud. All of it in one shared coordinate system, so what you point at on the map is what you get in the imagery.
This is the part that tends to be underestimated. A viewer is useful, but the imagery has to work just as well inside the systems the municipality already runs. So everything is also offered as a service over WMS and WMTS, which puts the layers straight into Kaartviewer, dgDialog and QGIS. On top of that the viewer opens from a URL carrying coordinates, so staff click through from their own application and land on the right spot. Searching works on XY and on address, through the Dutch BAG register and the PDOK location service.
The collection is divided by how often anyone actually needs it. Ten terabytes on fast storage for the current years, twelve terabytes with a load time of at most five seconds for the middle band, and twenty terabytes of archive for the older years. The municipality’s own administrator moves material between those tiers. And there is an exit plan: within three days all data, whole or per image type and per year, can be copied to their own environment or another party, after which it is demonstrably removed from ours. That is what vendor independence comes down to in practice.
Sign in runs through single sign on with Azure AD, where new users are created automatically from Active Directory and authorisation is handled per group. Rights can be granted to municipal and external users alike, per action: view, move, delete or download. The availability agreement is round the clock access seven days a week, with at least 99.5 per cent during working hours, an MTBF of at least a hundred days and an MTTR of no more than four hours, reported on annually.
