The image of the South West of England is being served via the Internet to schools in England’s South West Grid for Learning. WebBased is ER Mapper's leading partner in the provision of on-line Educational software. 

Students use the image across the learning curriculum.  For example, in History the image is overlaid and morphed with a map of the same area from 1880.  Citizenship classes use the imagery when studying local areas and environments. The InfoMapper application makes it possible for the user to draw over any area of the image and attach or link to information and digital resources about that area.

UKP, Britain's largest aerial photography data supplier, were commissioned to create the 3.9 Terabyte (3,900 gigabytes) ECW image.  The image was comprised of over 24,000 individual 1km tiles of aerial photography.  The tiles had a mixture of 10cm and 25cm resolutions.  The ER Mapper application was used to mosaic the entire dataset into one seamless ECW image. The image is served using InfoMapper powered by ER Mapper's award winning Image Web Server technology.  Image Web Server is a high-performance application that effortlessly serves ECW and JPEG 2000 images of any size to unlimited numbers of concurrent users. 
 
Adrian Beaven-Smith, WebBased, CTO stated "Using traditional file management techniques and server technology is just not a viable solution when you are dealing with imagery of this proportion. ER Mapper's ECW and Image Web Server technology allows us to dramatically reduce our IT infrastructure requirements whilst providing a superior client experience in terms of image delivery speed, even over slow networks. When you consider that we are currently serving up over 12TB of imagery to over 21,000 users from over 800 schools and these figures rising daily, then our image serving solution has be robust, cost effective and very, very, scaleable."
 
Stuart Nixon, ER Mapper's CEO and Founder added, "The cost benefits that any organisation can enjoy when using our technology for large scale imagery solutions are huge. ECW compression when coupled with Image Web Server provides an unlimited capacity to manage and serve raster data of any kind. Our streaming ECWP protocol uses one and half times less bandwidth than any other web based protocol and our Image Web Server is a massive 60 times more efficient than traditional GIS servers trying to do the same job."
 
About WebBased
WebBased specialise in the design and production of Internet, Database and Imaging Technologies for education and business and has a portfolio of regional and international clients. The company has grown naturally, with no outside investment, through successful projects and client recommendations. Visit us at http://www.webbased.co.uk. For further information contact Adrian Beaven-Smith ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or tel:01752 791021)

About South West Grid for Learning
SWGfL continues to work as a Regional Broadband Consortium to connect all the schools in 16 LEAs. At the end of September 2004, 63% of the schools out of a total of 2454 schools are now connected. By March 2005 it is planned to have completed 80% and the consortium is still on target to connect all schools in the region by the end of 2006.

South West Schools have been using and involved with the development of InfoMapper since it was first produced. Now over a fifth of all the 2454 South West Schools are using the Infomapper application. This powerful educational tool has allowed pupils in schools to look at maps and digital aerial photographs through time and overlay their project work. Not only
has this been possible within the local geography of the South West, but increasingly as more maps and photos become available from other areas of the country, children can use birds eye pictures and maps of features all over the UK and the world.

About ER Mapper
ER Mapper offers integrated imagery solutions for enterprise geospatial applications. Clients in more than 120 countries use the ER Mapper product to prepare imagery, ECW JPEG 2000 to compress and use imagery, the Image Web Server to serve imagery over the Internet and RightWebMap for integrated web map solutions. Visit ER Mapper at www.ermapper.com or the Image Web Server web site at www.EarthEtc.com