ENEA Rely on ERDAS APOLLO to Ensure Sustainability

30 September 2009, 1:34pm

Norcross, Georgia (USA) — ERDAS and Planetek Italia announce that ERDAS APOLLO has been implemented by the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA). ERDAS APOLLO is providing decision support to help define the optimal location of energy plants to produce biomasses. These biomasses are a renewable energy source, biological material derived from living, or recently living organisms, such as wood, waste and alcohol fuels. Planetek Italia is ERDAS’ authorized distributor in Italy.

ENEA is a public agency supporting Italy’s sustainable development in energy, the environment and new technologies. ENEA is an existing Planetek Italia customer, already using several other ERDAS desktop authoring solutions.

In Italy, there have been a number of studies on how biomasses can be used for alternative energy. However, these studies often use different methodologies, lacking geocoding information, and are absent of digital maps. Thematic maps representing the availability of biomasses do not express an area’s full potential, often lacking adequate supporting aerial imagery.

ERDAS APOLLO is an out-of-the-box, standards-based Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) solution that efficiently manages and quickly serves massive amounts of geospatial data located and distributed across an organization. ERDAS APOLLO simplifies the utilization of vector, raster and terrain data, seamlessly integrating with existing GIS environments, leveraging business systems and supporting almost any kind of data input (including ArcSDE, PostGIS & Oracle).

For ENEA, the ERDAS APOLLO web client interface is a decision support tool for the installation and logistics of biomass facilities, as well as a tool for the planning and monitoring the national and European target for the energy policy. ERDAS APOLLO aggregates their different data sources, manages their raster and vector data and implements OCG Compliant Web Services to publish data maps. Ultimately, this enables the different offices of ENEA to consume information remotely. The availability of national Web Map Service (WMS) provided by the Italian National Cartographic Portal and the ImageConnect® catalogue from DigitalGlobe also allows users to integrate several data sources, and compare thematic maps and the Italian VHR satellite coverage with biomass databases.

Vincenzo Motola, researcher and project manager, ENEA Trisaia, said, "ENEA can now update remotely from its local and central offices the contents of the geodatabase, and to add new WMS services. We can now observe the status of bioenergy supply chains and its availability in Italy, and we can verify the real-time achievement of climate objectives requested by the European Union.”

The Atlante delle Biomasse is available at the link below.

“ENEA selected ERDAS APOLLO for its capability to catalog not only ERDAS APOLLO web services but also external web services, thus allowing the update of geospatial data to remote authorized workgroups,” said Thomas Bayer, Vice President, EMEA, ERDAS.

ImageConnect® catalogue

Italian National Cartographic Portal

Atlante delle Biomasse

ERDAS

Geo: International