New image service to be available for serving rasters in ArcGIS Server 9.3
A recent ArcUser
article mentions the new image service that will be available in ArcGIS
Server 9.3:
"A new and fast service for use in browsers or desktop image processing programs,
the Image Service is new in ArcGIS 9.3. It is a lighter-weight service
optimized for delivering raw or finished imagery that can be RGB, panchromatic,
multispectral, or elevation data stored in a geodatabase or file system. Data
sources for Image Services are raster datasets, in formats such as TIFF, MrSID,
IMAGINE (IMG), or JPEG2000, or can be raster mosaics. With the Image Server
extension, Image Services can also use compiled image service definition
(ISCDef) data. Image Services can be managed either with the ArcGIS Server
Manager or ArcGIS Desktop ArcCatalog application."
The article also mentions that optionally you'll be able to expose image
services through the OGC Web
Coverage Service (WCS) specification:
"With WCS, clients can obtain subsets of data; request that data be resampled,
reprojected, or returned in a specific raster data format; and output files in
GeoTIFF, National Imagery Transmission Format (NITF), Hierarchical Data Format
(HDF), JPEG, JPEG2000, and PNG formats."