BlomURBEX is the family of products and services enabling Europe’s largest off- and online geo database.

BlomURBEX is a combination of hardware, software and data repositories available via Internet. This enables fast development of consumer and professional services and other applications based on Blom’s imagery and map data models.

The popularity of Satellite imagery has expanded massively. Integration with mainstream directory services across the internet is now not only commonplace, but expected. Whilst it is clear the Satellite imagery adds value to traditional maps, they are far from comprehensive. The scope of these images is limited as they can only provide a vertical view. In the case of urban environments, this shows little more than roofs, which are often similar from one building to another. Blom has strived to overcome this limitation, which has resulted in a new concept called BlomURBEX.

BlomURBEX is an online service provided by Blom from several computing centres located worldwide, offering a revolutionary collection of geographical datasets. These datasets show urban environments with high-definition real images and 3D textured models, extracted from at least five different views and accurately geo-referenced to fulfil both the end consumer expectations and professional/engineering requirements.
It is fast and powerful, accessible from any environment via a variety of technologies and applications, and designed to be able to serve millions of users. The solution is robust and stable enough to meet the requirements of any ambitious enterprise and consumer expectations.

BlomURBEX enables incredibly fast development of consumer and professional services, which results in applications enriched with Blom’s data models. Another advantage is that the end user does not need to host the vast volumes of data on their own server.
In other cases, such as mobile services, supporting on-board data for large areas is difficult and expensive due to the huge memory requirements. An increase in memory size would increase the device price considerably. Usually it is simply impossible to load all the data embedded on the device, so an on-line solution would be the only viable approach.

To solve these issues, Blom has developed BlomURBEX, which can deliver all Blom’s data on-line, to any mobile application.

BlomUrbex has the following advantages compared with similar geoserver solutions:

• The service is accessible by versatile applications: from desktop to mobile.
• It is available whatever the access network is: LAN, Internet or mobile networks.
• The system provides high availability, fault tolerance, low latency and easy scalability.
• Delivered data weight is compliant with any potential application even on board and mobile.
• It easily manages large volumes of data (hundreds of Terabytes).
• The data delivery schema allows fluid data manipulation on the client side (Zooming and panning).
• The data delivery schema guarantees a minimum data transfer, especially when expensive networks are used (e.g. GPRS).
• The data delivery schema enables multi-tiling and client cache, as the weak point in the market model are communication costs.

The BlomURBEX service is provided from several data centers worldwide. It is comprised of a Storage Tier holding Blom imagery and data repository processed in such a way that fast and reliable data delivery is achieved.

A service tier is available on top of this storage tier, providing two kind of services:

• Tiled HTTP Services, giving low-level access to the full functionality of BlomURBEX. Blom Software Development Tools are constructed on top of this services.
• 3D Streaming, providing on-line access to Blom 3D Urban Models

The whole scope of programming interfaces and SDKs available for BlomURBEX are covered in the Software Development Tools section, please visit that section for more information.

BlomURBEX data models include the following

• Orthogonal images: continuous projected mosaic of vertical views with a 10 cm resolution.
• Oblique images: sets of fully geo-referenced pictures provided with true orientation and scale. Resolution between 13 and 18 cm.
• Orthorectified-oblique: continuous projected mosaic of oblique views.
• Textured 3D: Full 3D modelled cities with both building and ground fully textured.

For more information refer to the Imagery & Models section

Functionalities provided by BlomURBEX allow full access to the usual geoserver request as well to advanced measurement functions:

• Image delivery: Delivery of images, and supporting services to retrieve images and tiles that cover a particular point. This includes zoom, panning and common visualization functions.
    • Zoom in, out, extent
    • Pan
    • Continuous pan for ortho layers
    • Pseudo-continuous pan for oblique views
    • Switch between different views 

• Measurements: azimuth, length and areas on ortho images. Areas and building heights on oblique images. Ground elevation on every model. All functions make use of the embedded DTM to achieve this. 

• User Authentication/Authorization: Only authorized users can access the data. BlomURBEX grant a particular application with access to certain services, and subsets of data or geographical areas. 

• Log system: The server logs previous access details for management, billing and statistical purposes. 

• Support for historic data. All services will be able to deliver either the most up to date images or older images from a certain date. 

• Services for coordinate conversion: Easy conversion of different coordinate systems even when viewing oblique images 

• Recovering Metadata associated with an oblique image 

• Drawing of Markers or vector information on top of the images

If you want to test the power and capabilities of BlomURBEX, please refer to the Partners Zone section.