The GeoInformation Group news release

February 1999, The GeoInformation Group, the leading supplier of high-resolution geographic information, has been appointed as a reseller of the MrSID Image Compression technology with the UK and Ireland as sales territory.

MrSID was originally developed by the Los Alamos Laboratory for the compression of fingerprints on behalf of the FBI. It offers users of images a powerful imaging environment including compressors, viewers and proprietary file format offering unsurpassed image compression with uncompromised image quality.

The benefits of MrSID have been available to users of Cities Revealed high resolution aerial photographic solutions since the launch of the Cities Revealed Viewer last year and this agreement provides the opportunity for other users of raster images to benefit from improved access to and distribution of imagery and raster data.

Following a successful evaluation of this technology the National Library of Scotland have purchased a full licence. Tony Stuart of the Library said, " à we were pleased with the results obtained with the evaluation version." He continued "We aim to create single images with multi resolution capacity from original tiff scans to be accessed via our online web site. The impressive ratios achieved together with the ability to produce single compressed files from multiple files scanned together offers us a capability not previously available."

The National Library of Scotland follows other organisations both in the UK and internationally in recognising the advantages of fast and efficient data management.