FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. - eSpatial, Inc., the leading spatial information management company, and the University of Arkansas Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies have entered into a joint venture to establish a Center of Excellence in Enterprise Spatial Solutions on the UA campus. eSpatial will provide geospatial software site licenses to the Center while CAST will provide research resources and facilities.

The focus of the Center of Excellence will be to research, develop expertise and deliver enterprise spatial solutions. Immediate research areas include integrated enterprise applications, enterprise spatial warehouses in support of critical infrastructure management for homeland security, and location based decision support. The software provided by eSpatial will provide the necessary development and deployment framework to enable this academic research to be carried out.

Fred Limp, University Professor of Anthropology and director of CAST, said, "eSpatial has created a unique library of computer components and a software development environment that can access geographic data contained on an Oracle database. This development environment is very effective for creating practical solutions for geospatial problems. With the eSpatial software our staff will be able to quickly develop applications that address a wide range of research questions and create prototype solutions that can aid the public in new ways of using geographic data in decision support."

UA Chancellor John A. White said, "An international corporation like eSpatial knows that the availability of the most current software is essential to the University’s research-based service efforts. We’re grateful for eSpatial’s partnership, which supports our vision; possessing the technology makes us nationally competitive; incorporating it in our service mission helps us serve Arkansas and the world; and making it available for geographic information systems research is consistent with our research university mission."

Philip O’Doherty, CEO at eSpatial said, "eSpatial and CAST share a joint vision - to integrate geospatial data and processes within general enterprise solutions. The Center of Excellence established today captures our many shared interests and we look forward to it evolving over time and becoming a multi-faceted collaboration with successful joint initiatives in the areas of research, education and technology transfer. Furthermore, both our organizations enjoy a long and sound partnership with Oracle and this allows us to deliver enterprise spatial solutions using the Oracle Spatial Platform as a core component."

"We have been working with Oracle databases for more than five years and are very excited with the new capabilities provided by eSpatial," added Limp. "We are particularly excited because eSpatial will play an important part of the growing linkages between CAST and the UA Information Technology Research Center. The ITRC recently received a major gift from Oracle that will be used by ITRC to support business intelligence research and we are talking with ITRC Director Bill C. Hardgrave on ways in which we can spatially enable some of these approaches."

CAST, was established at the University of Arkansas in September 1991 to bring together the considerable expertise of a network of researchers with a long-standing history of geographic information systems (GIS) development at the University.

CAST is dedicated to applications in GIS, remote sensing, digital photogrammetry and interoperability and has been selected by the Intergraph Corporation as a Center For Excellence for the Mapping Sciences, by the Oracle Corporation as its first Center of Excellence in Spatial Data Management, by Sun Microsystems as a Center of Excellence in Distributed Computing for Spatial Data Management, by the Trimble Navigation Ltd. as a Center of Excellence for GPS Mapping Systems: Training and Research, by Skyline Software as a Center of Excellence in Geospatial 3D Visualization and by Definiens Imaging as a Center of Excellence in Object Oriented Image Analysis.

As a multi-college organization, CAST works with faculty and students from the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences, the Walton College of Business, the College of Engineering and the School of Architecture in the common goal of introducing and making GIS technologies available to a wide variety of researchers and professionals and to furthering the field through basic and applied research.

CAST focuses on research, technology transfer, data development, undergraduate and graduate education, service to communities and local governments and professional training in GIS and related technologies.

eSpatial, founded in Dublin, Ireland, with United States headquarters in Herndon, Va., is a world leader in spatial information management technology. They provide a rapid development and deployment framework whereby any enterprise application can be spatially enabled using standard IT tools. The software donated to the University of Arkansas is an advanced spatial environment called iSMART®, which allows organizations to quickly and easily build new applications, or extend existing ones, to include spatial functionality.

ISMART’s unique open enterprise-standard architecture enables spatial intelligence to be easily and comprehensively embedded into operational systems. The iSMART architecture is optimized for high performance processing, and leverages standard enterprise technologies for security, application integration, user interfaces and web services. This allows it to be deployed to any device anywhere, and integrated with any application. That may simply mean displaying a map, or it may involve editing or spatial calculations such as computing an area or distance.

eSpatial’s technology is deployed worldwide in extensive vertical markets including the public sector, defense, telecommunications and utility organizations.

More information about CAST and eSpatial may be found on the Internet at: http://www.cast.uark.edu/ and http://www.espatial.com .

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