About this release

This 2023.1 release completes the 2023 initiative to add more support for access control to LuciadFusion. LuciadFusion version 2023.0 had already significantly extended sensitive data protection capabilities.

With this release, you can specify more fine-grained geospatial access rules: through areas of interest and scale ranges.

There is also a structural improvement to the 3D Tiles Engine, also called Meshup. This engine was added with the 2018 product release, and has become a very popular capability. After five years, we decided to refresh it to make it leaner and more powerful.

Finally, this release includes important security upgrades and bundles a rich set of specific enhancements, based on user feedback. Please also read our advanced notice of the minimum Java version for LuciadFusion for next year and beyond.

luciad portfolio
Figure 1. The Luciad portfolio.

Benefits of the new features

Fine-grained configuration to access your data

Access control is an essential part of data publishing and dissemination. LuciadFusion already offers the tools to protect access to data and services. However, for geospatial data, the spatial dimension can be a parameter in defining who can see which data. Geospatial data security is a current topic of research, and typical aspects include granularity and geospatial logic based on the data extent. See for example this quote:

As an extension of general access control mechanisms in the IT domain, the mechanism for geospatial data access control has its own requirements and characteristics of granularity and geospatial logic.
— J. Lin linjiayuan@gmail.com
Y. Fang , W. Zhang & Z. Huang (2009) Fundamental aspects of access control for geospatial data, International Journal of Digital Earth, 2:3, 275-289, DOI: 10.1080/17538940902818329

This release of LuciadFusion brings advanced access control configuration. You can restrict access via two geospatial mechanisms.

The first mechanism allows data access restriction based on scale range. You can specify the minimum and maximum allowed map scales for accessing the data. A typical use case is protecting high-resolution imagery for sensitive locations.

The second mechanism bases access restrictions on areas of interest. You define spatial areas with either the data that you want to include, or the data that you want to exclude. You also specify how to handle shapes that overlap with the bounds of that geospatial area: include, exclude, or clip them. The access to data inside a spatial area figure illustrates one example where access is restricted to all data strictly within a specified area. All overlapping elements are excluded.

states inside exclude
Figure 2. Restricting data access based on a clipping area. Only data strictly within the defined area will be accessible.

Geospatial access control is available for a selection of LuciadFusion services. The Service access control overview table lists the available services and the settings that apply.

Table 1. An overview of the LuciadFusion services that support geospatial access control.

Service

Scale access control

Spatial access control

Accept

OverlappingShapes

Inside

Outside

Include

Exclude

Clip

WMS

WMTS

WFS

WCS

Articles to get you started

The article Access Control in LuciadFusion has been extended to include instructions for restricting access based on scale ranges or spatial ranges. The new article Spatial restrictions in LuciadFusion adds more details about the definition of restrained areas and how to clip data.

Faster and more compact 3D Tiles

The 3D Tiling Engine, also referred to as “Meshup”, has been structurally improved.

multilevelingTitle
Figure 3. The 3D Tiles Processing Engine multi-levels mesh datasets.

As a result, tiling your data in the 2023.1 release:

  • Is faster

  • Uses less memory

  • Produces smaller output results, using fewer tiles

This not only improves processing time, but also decreases time spent downloading the data in the client.

The difference is most noticeable in large datasets, as well as datasets with repeating textures.

Articles to get you started

The updated algorithms are enabled by default. If you are new to this topic, the article Processing meshes into OGC 3D Tiles will help you get started.

Minimum supported Java version

For many years, we have fixed the minimum Java version for LuciadFusion to 8. With this release, we are giving advanced notification that the LuciadFusion 2023.x releases will be the last releases supporting Java 8. For the LuciadFusion 2024.0 release, we plan to raise the minimum version to Java 17. We will continue supporting both the Oracle JDK and OpenJDK.

Going forward, we aim to support the latest Java LTS version in our latest release. The minimum JDK/JRE requirements will never change with a minor upgrade, an upgrade from 2022.0 to 2022.1, for instance, or a patch release of LuciadFusion.

This also applies to LuciadLightspeed.

If you have any further questions or feedback on this topic, please contact the Luciad Product Management team at product.management.luciad.gsp@hexagon.com.

Articles to get you started

The documentation on Hardware and software requirements includes a new section that describes our policy and includes an overview of the supported Java versions for the various LuciadFusion product versions.

Security upgrades

This 2023.1 release of LuciadFusion includes many security upgrades. The release notes provide full detail on the upgraded, removed, and added dependencies. Please look for "security updates" in the upgrade considerations.

Product license versioning

Starting from the 2031.1 release, you only need a new product license for a major LuciadFusion product version.

More specifically, for version 2022.0 and 2022.1, you still need separate licenses. If you use your license file for LuciadFusion version 2023.0 with LuciadFusion version 2023.1, it will work. Of course, both product versions must have matching configurations, with an equivalent product name, product tier and options list.

Other improvements

OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) server-side performance improvement

Uncached GetCoverage requests are up to 40% faster with this new release.

DAFIF Path Point record support

DAFIF Path Point records are now supported. These records are used to store the path to be followed to land on the runway. In the past, a radar (ILS) was used for the final part of the approach before landing on the runway. GPS-based systems rely on a lateral and vertical path that needs to be followed, which is the information stored in Path Point records.

Support for Asterix Category 34

This release adds support for radar status messages encoded as Asterix Category 34. This category and its description have been added to the Overview of the ASTERIX specifications for the supported categories in the product documentation.

Unicode character support

LuciadFusion now offers better support for Unicode characters.

Custom raster format support on LTS

The LuciadFusion Platform Luciad Tile Service (LTS) can now be used together with custom raster formats. Examples of such data are custom elevation data sources. The article Registering a model decoder for a custom elevation format as a service has been added to assist you with this.

Keep data after failed recrawl

If the recrawl of data fails, you can now configure LuciadFusion to keep the data entry. This is useful when data is stored on removable media, for example.

Better support for non-georeferenced 3D data

LuciadFusion Studio now flexibly accepts non-georeferenced 3D data: unreferenced 3D data in the formats BINZ, IFC and OBJ can now be used in an OGC 3D Tiles service in LuciadFusion. The data will be pre-processed to OGC 3D Tiles when it is published in an OGC 3D Tiles service.

AutoCAD DWG 2018 support

LuciadFusion now supports DWG 2018 files.

SLD road styling documentation

The documentation section on OGC SLD/SE styling has been extended with a new example for styling road data. See the article How to style roads and SLD road styling for an illustration.

roadsWithWorldSizedWidths
Figure 4. Road styling with world-sized road widths and labels inside the roads.