Company Profile

Barrodale Computing Services Ltd. (BCS) has been providing effective and efficient software solutions to technical problems involving complex data since 1978.

Our clients' applications continue to be in diverse areas (e.g., defense sciences, electoral geography, aerospace, forestry, seismic processing, and watershed management) and so BCS staff members have expertise and experience in many disciplines. These include mathematical modeling and statistical analysis, signal and image processing, simulation and optimization methods, development and testing of algorithms, management and analysis of large spatial datasets, database design and implementation, and software engineering. To date, BCS has successfully completed more than 450 software development contracts for many different clients in the public and private sectors, including Ministries and Crown Corporations of the Government of British Columbia, Canadian Federal Government Departments, and US-based Fortune 500 companies.

Since 1995 we have focused our development skills and experience in object-relational database management systems (ORDBMS) to provide solutions for various geo-spatial applications. For example, we have produced an interactive watershed atlas of British Columbia. This 1:20,000 digital atlas is stored in an ORDBMS that can be accessed via the Web. BC covers an area of almost one million sq km (it is larger than Texas, or even France and Germany combined), and the dataset used in this atlas contains more than half a billion 3D survey points, one million lakes/marshes/swamps, and three million stream segments. Users can make requests throughout an entire lake and stream network; such as "Show me the area that drains into the stream indicated by my mouse pointer."

Another recent ORDBMS geo-spatial application is a BC electoral atlas that contains an integrated network of roads, municipal boundaries, electoral district and voter area boundaries, as well as extensive background data, including hydrography, railways, transmission lines, parks and Indian reserves. BCS has developed a comprehensive set of facilities for geocoding, data management, and map production, all using this electoral atlas data.

Most recently, we have developed two very efficient ORDBMS technologies. The Grid DataBlade supports database storage, update, and fast retrieval of gridded data. A typical application could extract location-specific meteorological data from a 4D gridded database that contains multiple weather-related values stored for extensive ranges of latitude, longitude, altitude and time. The second technology, DBXten, is a database accelerator that speeds up the ingestion and indexing of very large sequences of data while reducing storage space requirements. Typical applications of DBXten are in processing oceanographic, seismic, and financial data.

The company is wholly owned by its two founders, Ian and Sheila Barrodale. Dr. Ian Barrodale was formerly a Professor of Mathematics and Founding Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Victoria. BCS staff members are exceptionally well-qualified people with many years of experience in all aspects of software development, data management, and project administration. In short, BCS has more than a quarter century of experience in providing software solutions to a large variety of computer users, particularly those with technical problems involving complex data.