OpenTopography Software Updates and Site Improvements

Over the past few months we have made several updates and improvements to OpenTopography. Some of these updates are visible to OpenTopography users while many are on the backend including bug, fixes, system software updates, and other modifications to improve stability, processing speed, and new feature integration. A summary of the recent updates made in OpenTopography v. 3.9 and 3.10 releases:

User Interface:

• All new data visualization services including the option of adding color ramps to shaded relief images generated by OT.
• Increase in processing quotas for registered and power users. Quotas are increased for registered users by 50 million points per job to total 150 million points per job and to 200 million points per job for power users. To become a power user, create a MyOpenTopo account and request power user status under myOT Authorizations.
• New support for "private datasets": enabling OT to restrict access to datasets still under embargo, but permitting dataset owners to manage access to data for specific approved users (e.g., graduate students and collaborators).
• Site wide reorganization including changes to the site navigation to make the OpenTopography Tools Registry more visible and easily accessible as well as addition of twitter feed with most recent tweets from @OpenTopography on homepage.

Data Access and Processing Services:

• Updates and improvements to the TIN and local binning DEM generation tools.
• Complete update to OT visualization services (see above) for better performance and scalability.
• On-the-fly point cloud coordinate conversions. Currently implemented only for datasets that span coordinate zones (e.g., two State Plane zone).
• Numerous bug fixes, backend database updates, and updates for OT administrators.