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MapInfo Professional
The world's leading software for mapping and geographic analysis.
MapInfo Professional, the industry's leading business mapping solution, lets you perform sophisticated and detailed data analysis to increase revenue, lower costs, boost efficiency and improve service with location-based intelligence. Use MapInfo Professional to:
- Create highly detailed maps to enhance presentations and aid in decision making
- Reveal patterns and trends in your data that may otherwise be impossible to see
- Perform sophisticated and extensive data analysis
- Understand customer and marketplace demographics
- Manage geographically based assets, such as stores, people and property
- Plan logistics and prepare for emergency response
The award-winning MapInfo Professional package includes a built-in geocoder, more than 579 MB of data and an extensive collection of pre-designed maps. It's simple to use, powerful and easily integrates with other mapping applications.
Features
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MapInfo Professional is Microsoft Windows logo-certified to support the latest versions of Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional, in addition to supporting Windows NT, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 98 Second Edition. |
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Work you do in MapInfo Professional should be accessible to everyone. These Publishing features make it easy to put your analysis into colleagues' and executives' hands.
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- Crystal Reports version 8.5 provides powerful, user-friendly controls for creating complex reports, including the ability to embed maps via OLE and add charts; new wizards and templates for report layouts extensive export options to formats such as PDF, HTML or XML. The reporting engine comes with a powerful yet user-friendly interface for creating complex reports. Some of the feature highlights are: Back end Microsoft Access engine (MDB Files) ability to embed MapInfo maps, add charts, wizards and templates for report layout. Extensive export options such as PDF, XML, HTML and Excel formats are also available.
- Export Window allows you to choose a resolution that meets your needs.
- Workspace Packager,a new workspace sharing tool provides an interface that can copy all open files to a single directory and recreate the workspace referencing the new directory. The utility facilitates the successful sharing of complex workspaces that often access many network locations and data types.
- Scale Fill Patterns, another feature found in the Preferences/Output Settings dialog, enables the scaling of region area fill-patterns. This option is of particular importance when printing to high resolution printers at 300, 600 or 1200 DPI.
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MapInfo Corporation continues to offer the widest array of data
specifically engineered to work flawlessly with MapInfo Professional.
Highlights include: ZipInfo |
Updates
- India File (increased detail)
- Added Africa Folder with enhanced color
- Added Africa Water Layer
- Zip Boundary File (Using GDT's latest data from July'03)
- Uscty_1K table
- Uscty_8k table
Geocoding
MapInfo Professional's built-in geocoding capability allows for fast and accurate placement of address data onto maps. Numerous controls are at your disposal, including the ability to specify how far to offset an address from the side of a street and how far to inset an address from the ends of street segments.
MapInfo Professional also allows you to create points quickly and easily. If your data already contains coordinates - longitude and latitude or others, you can map it directly by creating point objects from the coordinates.
If not, you can still get your data on the map either by geocoding it or by joining it to an existing map layer to create a thematic map.
Create Points
The enhanced create points interface in MI Pro provides the ability to use non-numeric fields to create points. It also provides the option to recreate existing points. The overall benefit is greater simplicity and flexibility of visualizing customer data.
MapInfo Professional makes your analysis effortless with the ability to measure distance, length, perimeter, and area. You can aggregate the count, sum, average, min, max, and weighted average. You can also perform geographic joins, contains or within as well as textual matches. Finally, use these tools and options to extract information from your data:
- Info Tool: click on any point of the map and retrieve the database records of all the objects located there.
- Statistics Tool: show the sum and average of all the numeric fields in all the records in the current selection. Dynamically changes with the selection.
- Calculate Statistics Option: calculate the minimum, maximum, range, sum, mean, variance, and standard deviation of a single numeric column of all the records in the current selection.
 Prism maps are great for bivariate mapping. Combine with color thematics to map two attributes onto one map.(click to enlarge) |
Prism Mapping Uncover patterns and trends based on data values with Thematic Mapping. You can shade, use bar & pie charts, graduated symbols, dot density, and grids. The new prism mapping feature lets you take a flat map and turn it into something special. You can select regions on your map, extrude them to any height and your maps pop off the page. Choose from hundreds of colors, symbols and line types to enhance comparisons and store popular combinations in Thematic Templates. Save frequently used templates for future reference and modification. |
3D Views
3D window and Prism maps continue to be a distinctive and powerful way to visualize and analyze data and MI Pro makes this feature even more compelling.
The drape files over 3D terrain are now of significantly higher quality, resulting in more legible labels and higher quality 3D maps.
Create a 3D view of any map containing a continuous thematic grid layer. Based on Microsoft's implementation of OpenGL software graphics interface, our 3D viewing feature allows freehand tilt and rotation of the image as well as traditional panning and zooming.
Create 3D views with any grid format by directly reading MI Grid, VM Grid, DEM, DTED and GTOPO30. Make the terrain stand out by interpolating the data or by using relief shading.
And to really make your maps something special, utilize the prism mapping function to extrude specific variables to new heights --- making them pop off the page.
 Combine multiple raster images with your vector data to create very rich, very realistic maps.(click to enlarge) |
One of the most powerful aspects of MapInfo Professional is its ability to combine data from widely different sources, even with different formats and projections, in the same map window. Once combined in the map window, relationships that only exist geographically are revealed. You can also overlay vector and raster data together. In the map window, you can control the order of layers, their display characteristics, and labeling. You can also control the translucency of raster images. Now, instead of simple backdrops, raster images can be made semi-transparent and mixed with vector and other raster images. |
MapInfo Professional adds optimized "look ahead" logic for raster display. This code enhances the overall map processing by skipping invisible raster layers that do not need to be processed. This results in greater response from the product even with large data sets.
MapInfo Professional also enhances the raster registration process by providing the ability to select the control points from the map. This enhancement saves time and streamlines the geo-referencing process of aerial imagery. MapInfo Professional adds a new vector registration utility that provides an option to re-project a vector layer. This utility significantly simplifies the import process of AutoCAD or Microstation files since this data often does not have projection information.
MapInfo Professional has been enhanced to offer even more powerful enterprise data access with support for the following applications:
- Oracle Spatial 9i including 9.2.03 and 9i Locator, Oracle v8.1.7
- Microsoft Access 2000
- Microsoft SQL Server version 2000
- MapInfo SpatialWare 4.6
- Informix 9.21
Many private and public organizations use Oracle as the back office standard for their data. MapInfo Professional supports Oracle as well as Oracle Spatial directly, thus enabling these organizations to analyze the data from its original source without additional IT effort on middleware.
In addition to offering enhanced enterprise data access, MapInfo Professional enables you to access local data in a wide variety of formats including:
- vector data in MapInfo TAB and WMF files
- raster data in BMP, JPG, TIFF, BIL, SID, PNG, PSD and ECW files
- grid data in MapInfo MIG, VMGrid, DEM, DTED levels 0-2, and GTOPO30 files
- tabular data in Delimited ASCII text, XLS, WKS, DBF and MDB files
- Microsoft Excel data as large as 65,536 rows
- Direct reading of ESRI Shape File format
- Support for GML V2 (Geography Markup Language). Allows the importing of individual files for OS Mastermap Independent polygon format, which is supplied by the UK Ordnance Survey.
- Extensive support for imagery (Raster) formats including built-in MrSid and ECW support, JPEG2000 Import and Export support,built-in support for ADRG, CADRG, CIB, ASRP and NTIF (Government Raster Formats), PDF and XML supprt for exporting reports (through Crystal Reports 8.5)
With the Universal Translator, MapInfo Professional makes importing and exporting data in different formats easier than ever before.
- Import vector data with these formats MIF/MID, DXF, DGN, SHP, E00, VPF, and SDTS
- Export vector data with these formats MIF/MID, DXF, DGN, SHP, and E00
- Compress raster images into the ECW format
 Select and then invert, what could be easier...(click to enlarge) |
Hunt for answers in your data with standard SQL queries. In addition to the standard key words - Select, From, Where Group By, Order By, and Into, MapInfo Professional offers these special geographic key words:
You can also aggregate data with:
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Build and save SQL queries that access and integrate data from multiple tables. Frequently performed queries can be written once, re-used and even distributed to others. You can also invert a selection. Instead of crafting a complex query to select all but a few records or objects, just select the few you want to exclude, and invert the selection to unselect them and simultaneously select all the others.
MI Pro has made selecting geographic objects a piece of cake. Simply utilize point, marquee, radius, polygon, and boundary tools to complete your tasks. Select the appropriate tool and click or click and drag on the map to select the geographic objects you want.
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In addition to the simple drawing and editing tools, MapInfo Professional has powerful object processing capabilities. These include Combine, Disaggregate, Buffer, Convex Hull, Enclose, Split, Erase, and Erase Outside. Also included are smooth, unsmooth, convert to polygon, and convert to polyline. MapInfo Professional has new ways for you to clean and modify your data with new object processing functions including check for self-intersections, gaps and overlaps; clean self-intersections, gaps and overlaps; snap nodes together; and thin or generalize. These functions allow you to detect and correct self-intersections, gaps and overlaps as well as simplify geometry --- making your data more accurate. |
MI Pro offers tremendous advantages for creating, managing and analyzing data within your own custom-defined regions such as trade areas, sales territories, school or municipal districts.
- Voronoi Polygons introduce new possibilities for data presentation and analysis. Through simple user interface it is now possible to create exclusive coverage and trade areas for point data. Applications for such functionality are extensive. Some examples are: Finding exclusive trade areas for retail, modeling cell tower coverage or even working with dense point data in more presentable way.
- Split Objects simplifies the creation of custom areas in cases where you want to split a region (along a highway or river, for instance) by adding a line or polyline.
- Erase and Erase Outside on point objects, multipoints and collections.
- Data Aggregation support for buffer operation
MapInfo Professional greatly streamlined the user interface of some of the key object processing capabilities. As an example, buffering or creating Voronoi polygons from a selection or from an entire table creates separate objects that often need to be stored in a separate location. MI Pro offers the option to store the output in a new table, as part of the buffer or the Voronoi process. The new flow greatly simplifies the data processing and analysis which results in significant time savings to the user.
MapInfo Professional has a built-in feature that gives you the ability to build and manipulate districts and territories. It can work with any layer and over 500 different districts. As you build or modify territories, it displays running statistics that you specify on each: count of objects, sum and percentage of total of any numeric value in the data.
 Improve the way your terrain data is used to create 3D maps. Get more definition and more 'depth' making your maps more topologically accurate than ever before.(click to enlarge) |
MapInfo Professional provides continuous thematic mapping, independent of any existing geographic layer, via interpolation. For example, you can show air temperature as measured at various locations as a continuously varying color spread instead of trying to color political boundaries, postal delivery zones, or something else as inappropriate. MapInfo Professional gives you more choices in Interpolations. Choose between inverse distance weighting (IDW) - based and triangulated irregular network (TIN) - based interpolation. You can also add relief shading to the results of interpolation to make variations in the surface stand out. Any interpolated grid can be used to display a map in the 3D window. |
MapInfo Professional is enabled for the Internet in three different ways:
First, the Hotlink Tool lets you make any object or label into a hotlink.
You can launch web sites, open images such as BMP, JPEG, GIF and almost
any other file including multimedia AVI, WAV or documents like DOC, PPT
or XLS. And you can even open map files like TAB, WOR MDX and of course,
HTML Image Maps. Second, the HTML Image Map Tool lets you turn any map into
a clickable web page. Select one or more layers of points, lines, and polygons
to be active. Specify which, if any, columns should be included on the landing
pages and which should be links. Finally, use the MapInfo Metadata Browser,
included on the CD, to hunt for data on FGDC compliant clearing-house servers.
Click
hereto see an example showing countries of the world and their populations.
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Thematic legends show the colors, patterns, and styles in the map and the values associated with them Cartographic legends show all the other features of the map. |
Create and modify graphical and tabular data with MapInfo Professional's drawing and digitizing tools. Create professional looking maps by creating points, lines, polylines, polygons, square/rectangles, circle/ellipses, text, multi-point, region (multi-polyline), and collection objects.
Modifying your maps is a breeze with tools like snap to node, move adjacent nodes and trace. Editing your maps is also easily done with tools that cut, copy, paste, move, resize, reshape and undo.
You can rotate labels and symbols and in all types of styles including vector, raster, TrueType symbols as well as custom line styles. You can even fill patterns and use TrueType fonts. MapInfo Professional's tools make drawing and editing quick and simple.
MapInfo Professional gives you the power to manipulate tables easily with intuitive tools. You can add/modify/delete/index columns and pack tables, quickly and easily.
MapInfo Professional offers automatic, on-the-fly, and customizable, coordinate systems derived from any of 30 major projections. Users modify existing and/or add new coordinate systems based on these projections.
MI Pro ;also offers the ability to rotate maps with an Affine transformation as well as being able to display cursor location in decimal degrees, DDMMSS, meters, and Military Grid Reference System.
Supported projections include:
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Get noticed with MapInfo Professional's interactive graphs and charts including 3D, bubble, column, histogram, surface, area, bar, line and pie scatter charts. Select graph templates from thumbnail sketches. Graphing style control includes position, tilt, rotation and pie explosion. Choose database records by clicking on sections of a chart or graph.
MapBasic Development Language
- Custom menus, dialogs, buttons
- External function cells
Integrated Mapping
- Visual Basic, C++, and PowerBuilder
APIs
- Raster
- Grid
- Interpolation
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MapInfo Professional provides tools for every imaginable task, too many to list. A brief selection of some unique, popular and powerful tools includes: A Coordinate Extractor tool which simplifies getting coordinates out of geographic objects and into columns in the database. |
Three Rotation tools - one for symbols, one for labels, and one for map windows -are included for ease of use. These tools enable you to rotate all the symbols in a map, labels in a map, or the entire map window at once.
A ScaleBar tool that can even create horizontal scale bars on projected maps with curved lines of latitude.
A Table Manager tool that supports adding, modifying and deleting meta data keys and displays the meta data associated with a table. Meta data templates can also be used to streamline the process for users who create or modify tables frequently.
The MapX Geoset tool provides read/write access to MapInfo MapX, MapInfo MapX Mobile and MapXtreme GeoSets.
The EasyLoader tool uploads MapInfo TAB files into Oracle Spatial and SpatialWare databases.
Drag & Drop Tool - Improve presentations by 'dragging and dropping' a map into other applications such as Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Corel Draw. Or export maps directly into Adobe PhotoShop.
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MapInfo Professional enhances its fill patterns. One of the key benefits of MI Pro is map visualization - fill patterns of regions provide the ability to highlight a region or differentiate different territories from each other. MI Pro adds over 100 new fill patterns giving greater options for map display. MI Pro provides the ability to have more custom symbols (up to 32,000), higher resolution and higher color depth and size symbols. Customers often prefer to use their own high-resolution company logo or even a store photo as a symbol on a map for their stores. MI Pro makes all this possible. The benefit is higher quality maps with any image size or color as the symbol. |
Set Map Window Scale in Layout Window
MapInfo Professional enhanced the scale control of the map window in layout
which changes the map zoom level to match the scale required without changing
the map frame. This enhancement facilitates the use of standard templates
for creation of consistent maps at a set scale in a given layout.
Use these features to enhance the look of your maps:
- New North Arrow allows you to place a stylized North arrow in a Map or Layout Window
- Label Partial Objects increases your labeling options
- Change View when using MGRS (Military Grid System) coordinates
Prepare for printing by positioning maps, thematic and cartographic legends, tables, graphs, 3D views, annotations on a virtual page.
With the enhanced data editing functions, customers now can rotate a selection of any map objects at a specified pivot point or offset map objects using precise units for a move or a copy operation. This capability is particularly important when creating custom geographies or editing and maintaining existing ones. MapInfo Pro also adds the ability to zoom in/out while in data creation mode. Another enhancement to the editing function is the addition of continues visible snap area and option to toggle into cross-hair mode.
In the area of tools and utilities, MI Pro provides two new utilities. The first is the enhanced line creation by bearing and distance tool which now supports any unit of measure and the output can be directed to any editable layer. The second utility is a line snap/extend tool that will extend or snap specified intersecting line objects.
To help create the precise and accurate results you want - faster - MI Pro delivers several new and enhanced functions for creating and editing maps and objects, including:
- Undo Nodes during polyline and polygon creation
- Nudge Objects using arrow keys
- Rotate Objects including lines, polylines, polygons, rectangles, circles and ellipses
- Control Default Settings for Projections, Object Styles and Autoscroll
- Projection Support added for Austrian Projection, Double Stereographic Projection, New Zealand Projection and Japan JGD 2000 Projection
Enhanced Keyboard Control:
MapInfo adds many new keyboard shortcuts to frequently used operations such as find, previous view, find selection and clear target as well as pan using the arrow keys and zoom in and out using the +/- keys. The keyboard support further simplifies the usability of the product and facilitates greater productivity.
Enhanced Open Windows Management:
MapInfo Professional enhances the Window Name/Rename utility to rename any open window and reworked the window management user interface for more efficient management of multiple open windows.
Working in MapInfo Professional is a delight with upgrades to several features that let you operate swiftly and efficiently.
- New File Open Dialog Box opens Tables, Workspaces raster images, ESRI Shape files or Database connections all for the same dialog box
- Set Default Locations for TAB files, Workspaces and MapBasic applications - much like Windows' "My Documents" folder
- Create New Table now includes an option to use an existing table as a template
- Data Import option for MS Excel has been enhanced
MapInfo is fully dedicated to providing software that enables users to
easily create, provide and share geographic data with other users. To that
end, we have be an principle member of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) since
1995.
Click here
to learn more.
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MapInfo Professional adds supports for Open GIS WMS Service. Customers can now access any Open GIS WMS Server (from any vendor) and add the data as a layer in MapInfo Professional. The Open GIS servers are often using different technologies in different locations over the intranet or internet. MapInfo Professional comes with many of them pre-loaded as examples with a simple user interface to add additional server locations as needed. The data that is accessed through WMS can be overlaid on top of data sets from local or remote sources. By supporting this Open GIS Consortium (OGC) service, MapInfo Professional provides a new level of integration and interoperability. |
MI Pro now offers more options and more flexibility for working with a wide array of file types - it brings you:
- Direct reading of ESRI Shape File format
- Support for GML V2 (Geography Markup Language). Allows the importing of individual files for OS Mastermap Independent polygon format, which is supplied by the UK Ordnance Survey.
- Extensive support for imagery (Raster) formats including:
- Built-in MrSid and ECW support
- JPEG2000 Import and Export support
- Built in support for ADRG, CADRG, CIB, ASRP and NTIF (Government Raster Formats)
- PDF and XML supprt for exporting reports (through Crystal Reports 8.5)
With the Universal Translator, MapInfo Professional makes importing and exporting data in different formats easier than ever before.
- Import vector data with these formats MIF/MID, DXF, DGN, SHP, E00, VPF, and SDTS
- Export vector data with these formats MIF/MID, DXF, DGN, SHP, and E00
- Compress raster images into the ECW format
MapBasic® Utility Enhancements for MapInfo Professional®
These are free MapBasic downloads for use within MapInfo Professional:
Data Versioning Tool
The ability to switch between different versions of data is very valuable but tends to be a cumbersome process to manage. This is especially true when the information spreads across a large relational database. The Data Versioning Tool provides a simple and easy-to-use interface that enables you to create, manage, and publish versions of data. Since the complexities of this function are handled in the database and within the application, the user can focus on data management with the individual versions rather than on the technical details.
The 3D Data Storage & Manipulation Tool
The 3D Data Storage & Manipulation Tool extends the functionality of MapInfo Professional by adding third-dimension (3D) characteristics to two-dimensional tables. It also adds editing capabilities to modify 3D coordinate values.
Traditional MapInfo tables are limited to storing two-dimensional objects using X and Y coordinates. The Oracle Spatial data management platform integrates with MapInfo Professional and provides useful 3D capabilities. Therefore, a prerequisite for this tool is that data must first be loaded into an Oracle Spatial Database.
After completing the loading process with EasyLoader, use the interfaces provided by 3DTools.MBX to open and edit the tables.
3D Fly-Through Tool
The 3D Fly-Through tool is an application that enables users to view their maps in 3D. It requires either a grid file in the current window or a layer that has region objects and an elevation column.
This application consists of a 3D rendering window and associated menu options for controlling the display in the window. In a typical application, the user will load one or more maps (consisting of elevation data) with associated drapes. The user then interacts with the data by using combinations of mouse events and keyboards presses in the 3D rendering window, or by selecting options using menu choices. Some features of this application include the ability to view objects from arbitrary view positions; control object lighting; color and/or contour the map surface with elevation information; define markers, create and load paths, and fly along the paths. Additionally, 3D widgets are available to measure distance, indicate horizontal flood planes, position lights, and create a colored elevation legend.
