Maptitude - http://research.umbc.edu/~roswell/maptitude.html
Agencies do not realize that Internet/Intranet mapping does not hold many
solutions for users beyond a novice and even trivial presentation of
geographic data. Not clear vendors are all that much better in that
understanding.
There is someone in our agency who has spent a zillion hours developing an
Intranet mapping solution with MapObjects that satisfies about 5% of the
needs. its cute at first pass but then as soon as I ask a relevant question
... it simply is not there. Of course by the time you pay the salary of the
developer, the hardware, and salary of all the web people to get it running
you could have bought 100, more like 200 copies of Maptitude for serious
users and set up a data ftp site for the data.
Server side mapping is NOT the solution except at a certain level of need
and likely this will disappear as users become more sophisticated and need
more extensive solutions. Broadband is not here yet, and no matter how wide
broadband is, it will not keep up with the demand except for a few days when
it's introduced. There is a fundamental physical law that governs this
stuff, its in the legislation that was passed regarding thermodynamics when
the universe was created. Thermodynamics has more to do with information
than it does heat.
Mapt for the web is great, but very soon any serious user of geographic
data is needing more. Desktop software is not dead or even ailing.
The solution is to have: Web mapping for some initial exploratory data
analysis, then data/layer access through the Inter/intranet. Then having a
useable GIS package on the desk top. Why would I want my word processing to
be web based? Would I use SPLUS or SAS on the web? Ease of use? really
folks, if someone who needs to do even vaguely serious analysis can't use
Maptitude then we are talking about a more fundamental problem than the
software. To generate the NUMBERS where the goody really lies in analysis
requires (often) a somewhat comprehensive capacity with a statistical
software package; in no way can anyone say that Maptitude (even AV for that
matter) approaches the difficulty of use of SAS, SPLUS, STATA, etc.
(Incidentally, Mapt could do well in hooking up with a stat package. AV has
done this with SPLUS and its not too bad)
Curious how web based apps that attempt to do serious things are trying to
dummy down apps for users. But the result is just the opposite, they in fact
dummy up.
Richard E. Hoskins
WA State Department of Health
1102 Quince Street
Olympia, WA 98504-7812
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
tel: (360) 236 - 4270
fax: (360) 236 - 4245
GMT -8
Note: All messages to and from the Department of Health may be disclosed to
the public.
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter H. Van Demark [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, October 27, 2000 7:56 AM
To: Maptitude
Subject: Re: [Maptitude] Future of Community 2020
Maptitude - http://research.umbc.edu/~roswell/maptitude.html
All:
You may be interested to know that HUD decided that, in the future,
Community 2020 would no longer be a packaged software product. Rather, it
would be completely Internet based. This was disappointing, because of the
great success that has been achieved with the packaged solution based upon
Maptitude.
Caliper did not believe that this was the right strategy for HUD. We
thought that a combination of packaged product and Internet access was the
best solution. However, HUD's IT people wanted tight control over what
users could do and an easy way to maintain live data. Consequently, users
will get much less functionality if HUD follows through with that approach.
Also, if the Internet service is interrupted, users will get zero
functionality.
You should all be reminded that Community 2020 is based upon Maptitude 3,
so that it could run under Windows 3.x. This is now a very outdated version
of Maptitude. One major limitation is that it will not run under Windows
98. Caliper offered to move the software forward to Maptitude 4 for a very
small amount of money, but HUD declined. Instead, HUD had Caliper develop
the E-Maps solution that is currently on their web site at
(http://www.hud.gov/emaps/emapsintro.html). This application, which was
featured on CNN last weekend and received 250,000 page hits, runs quite
effectively on two cheap boxes. It is a good example of the power of our
web technology and the Maptitude mapping engine.
In order to provide a reasonable alternative for Community 2020 users,
Caliper has been offering a $150 upgrade to the current version of
Maptitude. We are also still providing limited support to Community 2020
users at our own expense, as HUD has discontinued its support contract with
Aspen Systems. Many Community 2020 users have switched quite successfully
to Maptitude 4.
Peter
----------------------------------------------------------------
Peter Van Demark
Director of GIS Products and Training Phone: 617-527-4700
Caliper Corporation Fax: 617-527-5113
1172 Beacon Street E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Newton MA 02461-9926 Web site: http://www.caliper.com
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