By ADAM GIFFORD
While Land Information New Zealand labours expensively with imported software to digitise the country's land title and survey records, British archives and land registries are using New Zealand software to allow web access.
The Trapeze Highwire server and attached viewer were developed by Wellington company Onstream Systems, with some help from Technology New Zealand.
Managing director David Kelly said Her Majesty's Land Registry in London bought 30,000 licences for the viewer two years ago as part of a project similar to Landonline.
"It's using our viewer and it has written its own server running on DB/2 [IBM's database] on an IBM mainframe," Mr Kelly said.
"If they were starting it today they would probably use the Trapeze Highwire server as well."
Mr Kelly said he did not respond to the Landonline tender because he was still caught by a restraint-of-trade agreement after the sale to Wang of another company, Imaging Solutions, whose track record included the imaging of the Winebox inquiry documents.
While he had talked to Linz subsequently, "we are a small company and EDS [Electronic Data Services] is a big company and they made the deal."
Electronic Data Services has a $102 million contract with Linz to scan plans and to digitise the data on them.
Mr Kelly believes the Trapeze technology "could have chopped millions out of that deal."
The tool set behind Trapeze Highwire can be used to prepare images for capture, including reducing file sizes so they can go over the web as colour documents.
The server also does billing and allows users to annotate images. It will interface with any image database. The Trapeze viewer plug-in has Visual Basic, C++, Netscape and Internet Explorer versions.
A Java plug-in, about to be released, allowing the viewer to be quickly integrated into other applications.
Mr Kelly said the technology was embedded in several packaged document management applications.
They included Lombard Document Systems, a British company that specialises in local body document management.
The product was designed for easy installation by third parties.
"We knew we would be sending stuff out on a long stream, so we would not be able to walk on site to install it."
Mr Kelly said it took between half a day and a day and a half to integrate the Highwire server with a database.
"It's very close to plug and play."
The electronic files could be of any size, even thousands of pages, and the system was designed so users could handle files in manageable chunks, aided by previews.
Mr Kelly said: "The contract with Her Majesty's Land Registry required us to have 0.1 per cent accuracy, which comes down to the paper stretching in the printer."
UK registry using Kiwi know-how
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