About GIS Development

A Geographic Information System (GIS Software) is designed to store, retrieve, manage, display, and analyze all types of geographic and spatial data. GIS software lets you produce maps and other graphic displays of geographic information for analysis and presentation.

What is GIS Mapping Software?
GIS software lets you produce maps and other graphic displays of geographic information for analysis and presentation. With these capabilities a GIS is a valuable tool to visualize spatial data or to build decision support systems for use in your organization.

A GIS stores data on geographical features and their characteristics. The features are typically classified as points, lines, or areas, or as raster images. On a map city data could be stored as points, road data could be stored as lines, and boundaries could be stored as areas, while aerial photos or scanned maps could be stored as raster images.

Geographic Information Systems store information using spatial indices that make it possible to identify the features located in any arbitrary region of a map. For example, a GIS can quickly identify and map all of the locations within a specified radius of a point, or all of the streets that run through a territory.

In addition to the above capabilities, Maptitude implements a professional-strength relational database, a feature critical for GIS software. Attribute data may be freely joined to and detached from geographic layers and tables. Relational data manipulation is integrated with robust and powerful geoprocessing for spatial queries, polygon overlay, and other location-based analyzes. This is supported seamlessly so that data are moved easily to and from relational tables and geographic databases. In addition, the Maptitude fixed-format binary table supports 32,767 fields and 1 billion records, and has unlimited character field widths.

Geographic Information System Software Features

GIS Software Case Study
Maptitude is one of the most popular GIS software packages, and has extensive functionality. A list of typical GIS capabilities is presented below, and these are available in Maptitude:

Maps and Layers

• The Create-a-Map Wizard allows users to easily create presentation-ready maps using their own data or the default maps
• The Display Manager allows a map to be customized on-the-fly
• User-defined preferences for map units, left/right side-of-road routing, file permissions, geocoding parameters, and many other settings
• Toolbox and mouse-based map navigation is supported and includes panning, zooming, and magnifying
• Map bookmark management allows the retrieval of custom map views
• Multi-layer map feature query tools allow direct interrogation of spatial locations
• A map librarian/manager allows the organization of various saved maps and comes with a library of pre-styled demographic maps
• Geographic database layering controls allow customization of layer visibility and drawing order
• Multiple maps can be open simultaneously, and can be duplicated, combined, synchronized, tiled, cascaded, and minimized/maximized
• There is explicit map scale control including undo
• Layer autoscaling allows customization of the scale at which layers are visible
• An interactive map overview window provides perspective as you work and the ability to zoom anywhere in the study region

Visualization

• Extensive layer style control includes font/style/opacity settings for points/lines/areas/labels/legends/drawings; point and area styles can use most image formats and their resolution can be controlled via scaling
• Thematic visualizations include color, pattern/icon, dot-density, chart, scaled-symbol, and 3D prism themes
• A drawing toolbox is provided, the drawing items are customizable, and there is a selection of north-oriented arrows
• Each map has an editable legend that automatically lists displayed features and has a live scale bar
• Stand-alone charting capabilities include pie, bar, line, area, scatter, and function charts
• Advanced text label placement and management tools include live label manipulation en-masse or individually, automated positioning, callouts/rotation, font control, multi-line, framing, hiding, styling, prioritizing, stretching, spacing, autoscaling, and additional text manipulation settings
• Maps and graphics can be copy/pasted or saved as pictures/bitmaps (with optional quality/resolution settings) for insertion into MS Office and other external applications
• Printing to any printer/paper size is supported, with a wide variety of spatial print options including using fixed scale, with actual point sizes, and as pre-rendered images
• Report/layout creation can utilize settings for snap grids, rulers, paper size/orientation, dimensions, margins, alignment, print options, automated district printing, and a variety of other graphics software oriented options
• Map interaction can be recorded to video
• Layer style/label/autoscale override is provided through the Feature Display tool
• Cartographic coloring uses Brelaz's Dsatur algorithm to assign colors that ensure that no two adjacent regions have the same color

Geocoding

• The tabular and geographic find tool can identify locations anywhere on earth
• Robust and flexible pin-mapping tools support geocoding by address, postal code, city/town, join, coordinate, longitude/latitude, by any populated place in the world (village, town, city), and also manually  
• Custom geocodable indexes can be created to pin-map based on external datasets
• Geotagged images from smart phones, tablets, or GPS-enabled devices can be mapped

GIS Mapping Tools and Geographic Analysis
Geographic analysis tools are the most valuable component of GIS software because they let you analyze the geographic components of your data. Below are some of the geographic analysis tools that are standard in Maptitude: