Supported Storage Formats

Orbit GIS demonstrates some of the capabilities of the Orbit Technology. The Orbit Toolkit includes a Resource Driver API, allowing every developer to create a driver for each and every storage format. Any storage format can be addressed by a Resource Driver specially developed for that format.

Eurotronics has developed default support for a range of popular storage formats, which are included in all Orbit GT products. Format support may exclude some format specific features. Support for CAD formats may lack symbols, blocks, cells or other non-georeferenced vector data.

Orbit Native Formats OVF, OVFT
Standard formats SHP, E00, MIF
Limited support for DXF, ISFF, DGN, NTF
Support for over 100 formats using the included Orbit FME Resource Driver extension (read on: requires FME).

Orbit Native Formats OIF, OID, OMI
Standard Formats ECW, SID, TIF, GIF, JPG, JPEG, JP2, BMP, PNG

Orbit supplies native formats for vector storage (Orbit Vector File : OVF, OVFT) and image storage (Orbit Image File : OIF). For easy management of several storage entities, Orbit provides image catalog extensions OID (Orbit Image Database) and OMI (Orbit Multiresolution Image). These formats organize other resources with granular use restrictions such as scale limits.

The *.ORD Orbit Resource Descriptor is an extension file that can accompany any spatial storage format. As the name says, it describes the resource and adds information to it. For example, it can add an extra attribute table file and link it to the resource attributes by specifying the relationship.

ECW and MrSID drivers use the decompression engines developed and owned by the respective manufacturers Earth Resource Mapping and LizardTech. Both decompression engines are Microsoft Windows based *.dll's and stored on your file system during installation of Orbit GIS. Use of these engines is according to their respective Licences. These engines are only available on Microsoft platforms (until further notice from the manufacturer) and Orbit can therefore not support them on other platforms.

For both techniques, 2005 versions are supported.

Orbit GIS supports the access to many formats by using the “FME Objects” library from Safe Software (www.safe.com). This Resource Driver is included in the standard Orbit GIS package but the FME product to be purchased seperately.

The FME extension to Orbit GIS opens access to all formats supported by FME Objects, depending on the license you buy from Safe Software.

The Orbit Multiresolution Image is a compressed image format (not wavelet compression) that stores all kinds of images in a layered pyramid stack of resolutions. Multiresolution image files are used for fast viewing of large datasets.

OMI supports black/white, greyscale and color images and is supported on all platforms, unlike other image compression formats.

The current version of Orbit GIS supports all major projections and Coordinate Reference Systems as listend by the OGC. Many editing features however require an orthonormal projection system in the main view window to operate properly.

Vector data formats should be georeferenced. Take extra care towards CAD-based formats as they might not be georeferenced and tend to use a local co-ordinate system. There is an Orbit GIS extension available to georeference.

Image data formats such as ECW, SID, Orbit's OID, OMI and GeoTIFF contain georeference information which is natively supported by Orbit GIS. Other Image data formats require a separate header file containing the georeference information : Orbit GIS supports the *.tfw and *.tfo formats (for TIF files, as the associated extensions for other formats) as long as the header filename is equal to the image filename. Orbit also allows descriptive information to be stored in a supplementary file-individual *.ORD file (Orbit Resource Descriptor). This means that all image formats can be georeferenced without specific file extensions.