January 18, 2012 -- SCALGO has released version 1.1 of the software packages SCALGO Model, SCALGO Hydrology and SCALGO Simplify, which can be used to process massive terrain data sets (tens of billions data elements) on a normal desktop computer. One major new feature in version 1.1 is ArcGIS support. All SCALGO software modules can now be run from within ArcGIS, and can be combined with existing ArcGIS tools into complicated and scalable production pipelines using ArcGIS ModelBuilder. SCALGO Model can be used to construct raster and TIN terrain models from massive terrain points (such as LiDAR), as well as to simplify massive raster terrain models in a fully-specified and user-controlled way. SCALGO Hydrology can be used to perform basic hydrological modeling on massive raster terrain models, including computing flow accumulation, watersheds, bluespots (maximal depressions) and flood maps from rising sea-levels. SCALGO Simplify adds the raster simplification functionality of SCALGO Model to the SCALGO Hydrology package.
SCALGO has also launched the SCALGO Flash Flood Mapping product, which estimates the risk of flooding during extreme rain events on a regional or even national scale. The mapping shows how much rain has to fall before any given cell of a detailed raster terrain is below water, and thus it also shows what part of the terrain is below water after a given amount of rain. The SCALGO Flash Flood Mapping product is being offered as a computation service. Based on the service and its national LIDAR-based terrain model, the major Danish engineering, environmental science and economics consulting company COWI has already successfully launched a new flash flood map product in Denmark, which is being used by several local governments as well as one of the five regional governments in Denmark (covering approximately 13.000 km²).
Information about SCALGO technology, software products and services can be found at
http://scalgo.com.
SCALGO staff are also available to answer questions at booth 108 during the
2012 International LIDAR Mapping Forum (ILMF).
Scalable Algorithmics (SCALGO) was founded in 2009 with the mission to bring cutting-edge massive terrain data processing technology to market. The SCALGO technology is based on more than two decades of basic and applied research on I/O-efficient and geometric algorithms at Center for Massive Data Algorithmics (MADALGO) at Aarhus University in Denmark and at Duke University in the US, in collaboration with industry LiDAR and environmental GIS application experts. Software based on the technology can handle much larger terrain data sets on a normal desktop than most current software and thus it eliminates the need for accuracy-decreasing data thinning. The use of novel mathematical and algorithmic techniques also means that the software works provably efficient on all input data sets, delivering a completely specified output without the use of cumbersome work-flows such as those introduced by data tiling.