Teledyne CARIS, A business unit of Teledyne Digital Imaging, Inc. is a Canadian software company that develops and supports geomatics software for marine and land applications. The company is headquartered in

Fredericton Fredericton (; ) is the capital city of the Canadian province of New Brunswick. The city is situated in the west-central portion of the province along the Saint John River, which flows west to east as it bisects the city. The river is the do ...

, New Brunswick, Canada. CARIS also has offices in the Netherlands, the United States and Australia, and has re-sellers offering sales and support of software products to more than 75 countries.

History

The company was founded in Fredericton in 1979 as Universal Systems Ltd. and was a spin-off from research into data structures and computer-aided cartography at the

University of New Brunswick The University of New Brunswick (UNB) is a public university with two primary campuses in Fredericton and Saint John, New Brunswick. It is the oldest English-language university in Canada, and among the oldest public universities in North Amer ...

's Department of Survey Engineering (now the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering). The company's first commercial software product was called "CARIS" whose acronym stood for "Computer Aided Resource Information System". The company name was changed from Universal Systems Ltd. to CARIS in the early 2000s in recognition of this first product and recognized brand. CARIS was wholly acquired on May 3, 2016, by international conglomerate

Teledyne Technologies Teledyne Technologies Incorporated is an American industrial conglomerate. It was founded in 1960, as Teledyne, Inc., by Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky. From August 1996 to November 1999, Teledyne existed as part of the conglomerate All ...

and renamed "Teledyne CARIS."

Products

Teledyne CARIS Inc. provides

Geographic Information Systems A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a ...

(GIS) and related software for terrestrial applications such as land management, municipal planning and geology, as well as marine and hydrographic applications. The marine and hydrographic software is designed to handle the hydrographic workflow from the time sensor data is recorded through to its inclusion in a nautical chart or other GIS product. The company terms this the "Ping-to-Chart" workflow and has trademarked the term "Ping-to-Chart". A CARIS Spatial Archive, often referred to as a CSAR file, is a data storage mechanism designed for storing large amounts of

bathymetric Bathymetry (; ) is the study of underwater depth of ocean floors (''seabed topography''), lake floors, or river floors. In other words, bathymetry is the underwater equivalent to hypsometry or topography. The first recorded evidence of water d ...

data.

Standards work

Teledyne CARIS Inc. is a member of the

Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 199 ...

(OGC) and is a proponent of interoperability between different GIS systems. It markets its own GIS server which implements several OGC specifications, including

Web Map Service A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. These images are typically produced by a map server from data provided by a GIS database. ...

(WMS) and

Web Feature Service In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as ...

(WFS). Through liaisons with the

International Hydrographic Organization The International Hydrographic Organization (IHO) is an intergovernmental organisation representing hydrography. , the IHO comprised 98 Member States. A principal aim of the IHO is to ensure that the world's seas, oceans and navigable waters ...

(IHO), and with the hydrographic community, Teledyne CARIS Inc. has been closely involved in the development of the S-57, S-100, and other IHO standards. The company has also participated in the development, implementation, production and usage of electronic chart specifications such as

Electronic Navigational Chart An electronic navigational chart or ENC is an official database created by a national hydrographic office for use with an Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS). An electronic chart must conform to standards stated in the Intern ...

(ENC) and Digital Nautical Chart (DNC).

References

External links

www.caris.com - official website
{{Authority control Software companies of Canada Companies based in Fredericton GIS software Teledyne Technologies Canadian companies established in 1979 Software companies established in 1979 2016 mergers and acquisitions Canadian subsidiaries of foreign companies