Updated OpenTopography Point Cloud Processing System Released (OT v 2.0)

OpenTopography is pleased to announce the release of our updated LiDAR point cloud access and processing system: OpenTopography 2.0 (OT 2.0). This release has been available in beta for the past couple of weeks, but we've now fully migrated the functionality to the production OpenTopography point cloud system.

The OpenTopography 2.0 release represents 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) will be built.

Note that the OpenTopography 2.0 release is focused primarily on the LiDAR point cloud access and processing portion of OpenTopography. Planned future updates will address other aspects of the portal, including the data discovery page and standard DEM access. We also intend to add many new data sets to OpenTopography is the coming months.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions. Thank you,

- The OpenTopography Team
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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 digital elevation model generation
Various improvements to system backups and fail-over

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)