In the March 4, 2005 issue of Directions, Hal Reid's article "A Number of Colors" discussed the maps available in MapInfo Professional, saying "The maps just need to look a lot better." I'd like to address Mr. Reid's criticism.
MapInfo offerings, and MapInfo Professional in particular, are designed to be flexible and adaptable. Using MapInfo Professional, you can easily produce visually rich maps with hundreds or even thousands of colors.
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This map is an example of the visual sophistication you can easily achieve with MapInfo.
However, our solutions go far beyond simple map-making.
Employed in a wide variety of industries and roles, MapInfo Professional is the most advanced yet easy-to-use location-based business analytical offering on the market today. With MapInfo Professional, you can process large amounts of customer information and provide answers to complex business problems.
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As desktop systems have increased in power, our customers have increased the size and the level of analytical complexity they demand from the system. Today MapInfo Professional users may have workspaces in excess of 5Gig and they routinely use files with hundreds of thousands or even millions of records. The ability to access customer's native data residing in corporate databases and combine traditional analytical operation with spatial conditions represents the greatest value of MapInfo's location intelligence solutions.
So what about those maps? Because most applications of MapInfo Professional are analytical, and almost every customer's use is in someway unique, MapInfo typically chooses to illustrate capabilities with simple maps that effectively highlight a few key findings. Therefore, in our on-line demonstrations our key objective has been to keep the maps simple to read and understand. The software allows you to define the important elements of a map and control the cartographic design to address your specific business need.
MapInfo provides sample tables and sample workspaces. (A table is the underlying map information such as the basic map referenced in the first image in Mr. Reid's article, and a workspace is a combined image of different data types stored as layers, each with style types of the authors choosing.) MapInfo provides tools and utilities for selecting from a host of style templates but gives the user complete control over all stylistic choices.
What the end user sees as a map and the styles they choose in building that map are a function of both the software capability and the data the user chooses. MapInfo Corporation is more than a software company. As a location intelligence company we provide a huge array of data and information products, designed to work with MapInfo software, that help users create powerful information and make insightful decisions. Those data products ship with templates and styles that provide high-quality, visually appealing display options for customers to use. The beauty of MapInfo products, as mentioned above, is that the user can modify, use or ignore those templates to meet their specific need. MapInfo provides the tools and capabilities and lets the user determine the output.
With this said, we agree that presentation matters. [By visiting] MapSamples, Directions' readers can find examples of both sophisticated and simple maps created in MapInfo Professional for a wide variety of applications.
Sincerely,
Douglas Gordon
Managing Director, Product Management
MapInfo Corporation
