Presagis

Much has been written about the use of CDB and the support of Creator and TerraVista (and SE Core and many other presagis products).  However, there really are other platforms out there that do NOT use TerraVista to publish their databases, and aren’t necessarily ready to disband their hard-won technological edge in rendering based on an optimal scene graph of their own design that CDB simply cannot directly support.

In order to support these non-CDB compliant platforms, the most commonly requested source data is GeoTIFF/Shapefile/OpenFlight (3-d models)/DTED source data as nicely sized managable chunks, not a gajillion little tiles. Somthing similar to the Air Force Common Dataset (AFCD) or NAVAIR Portable Source Initiative (NPSI) suite of data formats.

There are many who have the perception that CDB is readily ingestible by any tool that deals with OpenFlight or JPEG 2000, but in my opinion, what would be very useful in reusing CDB would be to have a “decompiler” which could reaggregate the layers into larger georeferenced pieces, much like a provisioning system might do by mosaicking little bits of imagery into a larger piece for processing.

Is there any support / desire to have a tool available, be it a Presagis tool or 3-rd party, which could perform this task?

This is a good question, and this is something available through TerraVista. Using TerraVista a customer could import CDB an convert this as an example an NPSI Dataset.

We’re also working on changes to the CDB Specification (3.2) to reduce the number of files.  This will likely be done through aggregation of files together - especially for the raster files (elevation, imagery, material, bathymetry…).
This would make it even easier for 3rd party to reuse the CDB data for other system.

Is that in plain-vanilla TerraVista, DART, or SE-Core?  I have had a LOT of people show interest in your response on this.

The CDB Capabilities are available across all of the TerraVista version.
For the NPSI export capabilities, some of the capabilities is available in TV Pro and above. 

One of our Subject Matter Expert is currently working to convert from NPSI to CDB and CDB to NPSI.