iSMART 5, incorporates key new features including an out of the box GeoPortal to allow users to rapidly publish and query spatial data in days rather than weeks. The product provides an easy to use interface, delivers advanced features, including pure web editing, and allows organizations to deploy and maintain spatially enabled applications at a fraction of the cost and complexity of alternative solutions.

iSMART 5 is built on top of Oracle Database 10g and takes advantage of Oracle's technology stack. The product supports the spatial capabilities included with Oracle Database 10g with Oracle Locator. It also includes support for the latest version of the Oracle Spatial option, Oracle Spatial 10g Release 2, including its GeoRaster data type, topology data model, and geocoder. eSpatial is a Certified Partner in the Oracle PartnerNetwork.

"eSpatial's iSMART 5 is leading the way with a complete, easy to use Oracle-based product to deploy spatially enabled web applications," commented Steven Hagan, Vice President, Server Technologies, Oracle. "By supporting the new Oracle Spatial 10g GeoRaster, topology and geocoder capabilites, iSMART 5 lowers the cost and speeds the development of the modern, location enabled operational systems our customers depend on."

iSMART 5 also provides increased industry standards support including the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)-defined Web Mapping Service (WMS) server and client, and an OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) server, with support for OGC Geography Markup Language (GML).

David Sonnen of IDC commented: "eSpatial is showing the way future spatially enabled applications will be developed and delivered using open standards-based technologies on top of leading industry platforms such as Oracle."

eSpatial has been beta testing the iSMART 5 product for a number of months. An early adopter of the technology is the NOAA Northeast Marine Fisheries division. "eSpatial has been working with NOAA to develop an application to track and report on the distribution of protected marine mammals and other species" said Mary Colligan, Assistant Regional Administrator for Protected Resources of NOAA. "Key aspects of this system have been the low cost of development, its ability to integrate with disparate data sets and its ease of use for end-users," Colligan commented. "We are biologists; we did not want to become GIS experts to do our jobs. iSMART 5 allowed us to develop an easy to use geospatial application to meet our requirements."

eSpatial is working with a large number of business and technology partners to promote and sell iSMART based solutions. Business partners include Titan Corporation (US), Accenture (Ireland), Dotted Eyes (UK), Black & Veatch (UK), RealWorld (Netherlands), Vertis (Netherlands), Novageo (Portugal), Geoleaders (US), Great Circle Technologies (US), Geodecisions (US), ITGIS (Brazil), New Dawn Technologies (South Africa), plus many others.

eSpatial continues to work with world leading technology and data partners to provide best of breed solutions. These include Oracle, NAVTEQ (US), Laser-Scan (UK), Ordnance Survey (GB), Snowflake (UK) and PCI Geomatics (Canada).

"iSMART 5 represents a major stepping stone for eSpatial," according to Philip O'Doherty, CEO of eSpatial. "This product marks a new world of geospatial applications which are easier to use, truly enterprise-enabled, embeddable and more economic to produce."

According to Eamon Walsh, CTO of eSpatial, "iSMART 5 incorporates major new features including:

1) an "out-of-the box" GeoPortal containing features to define and configure interactive maps with role-based access restriction, and provide a rich set of pure-web-based interactions including view, search, edit, thematic analysis, and printing;

2) advanced features for rapid development and deployment of scalable and secure multi-user spatial applications;

3) management of data from Oracle Locator, Oracle Spatial and OGC web services;

4) ability to leverage existing GIS infrastructure by providing interoperability and co-existence with existing GIS applications."

iSMART 5 provides an ideal framework for rapid and cost effective deployment of multi-user web-GIS applications. Based on Oracle Spatial, it works seamlessly with an organization's existing GIS technologies, providing a bridge to standards-based enterprise spatial application architectures. Because of its "out-of-the-box" capabilities iSMART 5 can deliver rapid success for very little investment.

iSMART 5, available from the end of September, is available on leading open platforms including Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and Windows Server 2003, Sun Solaris 8, Red Hat Enterprise AS 3, Novell Suse Enterprise Server 9 (Linux)
ABOUT ESPATIAL

eSpatial is driven by the vision that spatial and location information is rapidly becoming a key part of mainstream business processes; integrated spatial information, anywhere, in any application. Our mission is to facilitate this by providing cost effective spatial technology that can drive the development of this market. Using the iSMART product suite, our specific technology objective is to create the leading open standards based platform and development tools for enterprise geospatial systems. Founded in 1997, eSpatial has headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, and Herndon, VA.
CONTACTS.

Alan Lawless, Marketing and PR, eSpatial Solutions Ltd. Swords Business Park, Co. Dublin, Ireland. t: 353.1.870.8800, f: +353.1.870.8899, info@espatial.com, www.espatial.com
DISCLAIMER & TRADEMARKS.

iSMART is a registered trademark of eSpatial Solutions Ltd. and / or its affiliates. Oracle, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft are registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. All other product names may be the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Copyright 2005 eSpatial Solutions Ltd.

All Rights Reserved.