If you are not familiar with CDB, it is an open synthetic environment database specification that is gaining a lot of traction in the modeling and simulation industry.
The CDB specification is very interesting for simulation with its design that embraces existing industry standard file formats and provides direct benefits to accelerate the production and deployment of databases, as well as improve their re-use. At its core, CDB defines two main concepts:
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A directory structure and naming convention to organize source data in a logical and quickly accessible way
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A software architecture where runtime publishers (RTP) access the CDB information and make it available to visual systems, computer-generated forces systems, sensor simulations, or any other elements of a simulation environment
The Creator and Terra Vista content creation tools are responsible for the creation and organization of the source data that makes up a CDB database. With the raw file formats that make up a CDB database including Tiff, GEO-Tiff, Shapefile, XML and OpenFlight, Creator has a direct role in the creation of moving and stationary models that populate a synthetic environment. Besides its unequaled capabilities to produce highly efficient OpenFlight models, version 4.0 of Creator introduces a new model analyzer that verifies that your models follow the specific rules of a CDB when it comes to creating a model's geometry.
Once 3D models are created and all of the GIS data is gathered for an area of interest, it needs to be organized following the CDB directory structure and naming conventions. While a user could technically read through the specification and organize the data manually, doing so would be very time-consuming and error-prone. Just like it does for the creation of compiled database formats, Terra Vista streamlines the creation of a CDB database through its easy-to-use Interviewer process by importing all of the data files and then organizing all of the raw source data as needed in the CDB repository. Beyond accelerating this crucial task, using Terra Vista also enables the production of databases in other formats using the same source data so that legacy systems that are not CDB-compatible can work on the same data set.
Content Creation is just the beginning of the CDB workflow within the Presagis family of products. You can look forward to the integration of CDB in our visualization and simulation products over the next few months. If you want to read more about the CDB specification, you can download a copy of the open specification from our web site or read through the more accessible CDB White Paper that we published last year.
