OpenTopography 2.0 Public Beta

UPDATE 06/10/10: The OT 2.0 beta period has ended and all features are now available in the production OT point cloud processing system

OpenTopography is pleased to announce the beta release of OpenTopography 2.0 (OT 2.0). Over the past few months the OpenTopography team has made significant modifications to the OpenTopography point cloud system in an effort to enhance functionality, stability, scalability, and performance. Although modifications to the system from the user's perspective are not dramatic (moderate design changes, a handful of new features - see release notes below for details), this release marks a complete re-architecting of OpenTopography at the service level and is thus quite significant. OT 2.0 provides the foundation upon which future OpenTopography developments (new processing capabilities and additional data) are built.

We intend to move OT 2.0 to production next week (tentatively Monday, June 7th) and invite your input on the new system before this move. Please visit: http://www.opentopography.org/beta to access the beta version of OT 2.0. If you are already a registered OpenTopography user, your username and password should work as normal. The changes made in OT 2.0 apply primarily to the point cloud processing system and the myLiDAR Jobs interface so you should focus your testing there.

Note: If while using the OT-beta site you click off of the "Data" tab, you'll be taken into the production OT environment and will not be able to get back to the beta site without entering the beta-url above.

Please send comments, suggestions, bugs, and other issues to info@opentopography.org.

Thank you in advance for your comments and suggestions.
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New Features and Updates in OpenTopography 2.0 Release:

System:
Complete re-architecting of OpenTopography at the service level to provide a full service oriented architecture which should permit us to more easily add new features and resources.
Significantly more powerful compute resources for DEM generation
Various improvements to system backups and failover

User Interface:
Redesigned point cloud download and processing interface which incorporates new features (see below)
Redesigned myLiDAR Jobs interface
Moderate redesigns to job submission, results, and metadata pages and emails.

New Features:
Download of point cloud data in LAS 1.2 binary format
Updated DEM generation algorithm with null filling via user defined window size (3x3, 5x5 and 7x7 window sizes)
Output of DEM files in GeoTIFF and Erdas Imagine (img) formats
Generation of hillshade and slope grids
New "Share these jobs results" option that allows users to share the results of their jobs with others (available only when logged into OT)