Autodesk Announces New FDO Providers
30 Sep, 2008Move aims to help geospatial open-source community minimize translation and data loss.
Autodesk announced the availability of new providers developed on Feature Data Object (FDO), an open-data access technology. FDO technology, originally created by Autodesk and now a fully endorsed project by Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), allows users to store, retrieve, update, and analyze geospatial data.
The new providers include two new Autodesk FDO Providers: Autodesk FDO Provider for GE Smallworld and Autodesk FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which are now available through the Autodesk subscription program for AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. The FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will also become available on OSGeo through the FDO open-source project.
"As a development partner, we appreciate the impact that open-source technology has had for increased community collaboration and rapid innovation," said Haris Kurtagic, CEO, SL-King. "By providing the open-source community the ability to work seamlessly on a variety of spatial and nonspatial databases and file formats natively, without the need for translation or risk of data loss, we further the success of the geospatial community as a whole."
In addition, new FDO Providers for IBM Informix, KML, and PostGIS have been developed. They allow customers to take advantage of the native support for additional spatial-data formats and let users access, view, edit, and analyze data from within.
"Today's announcement underscores our commitment to our geospatial customers and the open source community," said Lisa Campbell, vice-president, Autodesk Geospatial. "Autodesk continues to partner and work closely with the community to help these technologies gain adoption, and evolve and improve over time. Ultimately, users benefit from faster innovation and support for standards, allowing them to lower the cost of ownership by easily integrating multiple data types and database systems."
