What’s new in LuciadFusion 2026.0

LuciadFusion now offers you the capability to decode S-101 data, in the form of either a data catalog or an individual data cell. The use of catalogs is recommended, because it allows the cells to be loaded lazily, based on the current extents and zoom level of the map.

Like S-57 and S-63 data, S-101 data can be disseminated via WMS and WMTS services as well. The LuciadFusion WMS server specifically supports the use of SLD styles in WMS requests. A WMS client can use this capability to customize the styling of data published in a WMS layer. By default, an SLD style contains generic styling settings for vector and raster data. LuciadFusion extends this SLD styling capability by also supporting SLD styles with display settings for ECDIS data:

Because of that support, WMS clients can customize the styling of ECDIS S-57 or S-101 data published in a WMS layer.

These articles explain how to decode S-101 data and how to configure the display settings:

We also updated the article that explains what was already possible in terms of custom SLD styling for S-57 and S-63. Using client-defined SLD styles with an ECDIS-enabled LuciadFusion WMS server now also covers the interactive use of S-101 data through WMS.

The new support for APP-6E is seamlessly integrated into the existing military symbology capability. We refer to the article What are the supported standards? for an overview.

The new area of uncertainty indication is further explained in the article How to visualize the area of uncertainty indicator.

OCG WMTS services deliver data in a tiled and multi-leveled way. Knowing how these tiles are organized in a matrix, and what levels are available, greatly helps clients to efficiently request and display map data at various zoom levels. For each level, the organization of the tiles is defined as a tile matrix, and the collection of tile matrices for all available levels of details is called a tile matrix set.

You can now configure the list of available tile matrix sets that your LuciadFusion WMTS services offer, as well as the specific tile matrix sets exposed for certain data products.

The WMTS specification defines a list of well-known and common tile matrix sets. These are available by default. An example of a well-known tile matrix set is "GoogleMapsCompatible", for example. It’s compatible with implementations such as Google Maps, Microsoft Bing Maps and Open Street Map tiles.

Typically, service users can choose either JPEG or PNG as the return type for WMS or WMTS results.

The JPEG format provides fast, lossy compression, resulting in a small payload and quick loading times. It’s ideal for imagery or maps without transparency, such as aerial photographs or satellite imagery. However, JPEG doesn’t support transparency, and the lossy compression may reduce image quality slightly.

The PNG format supports lossless compression, ensuring high-quality images without sacrificing data integrity. It supports transparency, making it suitable for overlay maps or maps that require transparent backgrounds. PNG is typically used for maps with vector data, text, or overlays, but its file size is larger compared to JPEG, which can impact performance.

With this new option "jpgpng", the LuciadFusion service automatically chooses either JPEG or PNG based on the content of the requested map or tile. If it detects transparency, the service outputs the map or tile in PNG format to preserve the transparency. If it doesn’t detect transparency, it defaults to JPEG, taking advantage of its smaller file size and faster loading times. This dynamic behavior allows users to optimize both transparency and performance without manually choosing a format.

The LuciadFusion WCS service now supports the publication of products that consist of multiple data items. A use case is the publication of multiple tiled raster data items into a single WCS coverage. The publication in a WCS service does require that the product’s data items all have the same band semantics and geographic reference.

We added several new articles illustrating the use of the new capabilities:

LuciadFusion supports ISO metadata, but also allows you to define custom metadata properties and even use those properties for querying your catalog. See Extending LuciadFusion with custom properties and Using custom properties with Data for more information.

The supported EWKT geometry types for custom properties have been extended to support both POLYGON and MULTIPOLYGON, with the limitation that they can’t contain any holes. This allows you, for instance, to augment the data bounds with geometries representing the precise data footprint.

The LuciadFusion server now supports data compression in HTTP(S) responses by default. When a client includes Accept-Encoding: gzip in the request header, the server enables data compression if the response is at least 1024 bytes in length and if its content type is application/json, application/xml, text/html, text/xml, or text/plain. The article How to configure data compression in a service describes the configuration options in more detail.

The OpenAPI specification now offers the following improvements:

For a pointer to the REST API documentation, see Where can I find the LuciadFusion Studio REST API documentation.