mapinfomag_spring200..

More documents

Recommendations

Info

14 T E C H N I C A L F E A T U R E Check out MapInfo Professional v6.5 By Andrew Dressel he new MapInfo Professional ® Tv6.5 gives you the power to create visual masterpieces with its new functionality: Raster Image Translucency Prism Mapping Invert Selection More Object Processing: Clean, Thin and Disaggregate TIN-based Interpolation Multipoint and Collection Objects Coordinate Extractor Tool Military Grid Reference System Coordinate Display And affords you the benefit of numerous enhancements: Improved Remote Data Support Improved Raster Image Support HTML Image Map Tool Scale Bar Tool Defaults and Preferences Expanded Most Recently Used Files List Support for More Projections: Oblique aspects of Azimuthal Equal-Area and Cassini-Soldner Translucent Raster Image Handling Of all the new features included in v6.5, translucency is the most powerful visual enhancement to raster image support. It allows you to control the amount to which other map layers show through a raster image. Now thematic maps can be combined with raster imagery to form striking images that were not possible before. SPRING 2001 MAPINFO MAGAZINE www.mapinfo.com/magazine MAPINFO PROFESSIONAL ® v6.5 HAS NEW AND ENHANCED FEATURES THAT WILL MAKE YOUR MAPS COME ALIVE! MAPINFO PROFESSIONAL v6.5 IS SHIPPING IN EARLY JUNE. TAKE A LOOK AT MAPINFO PROFESSIONAL v6.5 AT WWW.MIPRO.COM. Translucency makes raster imagery more useful. With prism maps, numeric values are represented by height in a 3D view. Translucent rasters are great for telecom applications, emergency management applications, land use categorization, drive time analysis and more. For example, you can combine wire or wireless raster images with vector street and demographic maps, overlay flood or flood plain polygons with satellite imagery, layer color coded polygons with aerial imagery and stack isochrones with boundaries thematically shaded on demographic variables. With translucency, the possibilities are endless! You can vary translucency from 0 percent to 100 percent, apply it to grid files as well as raster images and apply it to multiple files and layers in the same map window. Prism Mapping MapInfo Professional v6.5 includes an exciting new way to show your data on a map: prism maps. Now you can represent any numeric value as the height of the associated region in a 3D view. Combine any of MapInfo Professional’s traditional thematic mapping techniques with a prism map for a dynamic way to show more than one variable at the same time. Easily drape other features of the map, including raster imagery, labels, roads, over the 3D surface to turn a flat map into something special. Database Connectivity Data access in MapInfo Professional v6.5 has been enhanced to support the latest version of Oracle Spatial ® . MapInfo Professional v6.5 also supports MapInfo SpatialWare ® v4.5 on all of its supported platforms including Microsoft ® SQL Server 2000 with linked tables and live access. Performance of live access with large tables has been improved by optionally reading a precalculated record count. Improved Object Processing Many new object-processing capabilities have been added to MapInfo Professional v6.5. In addition to detecting self-intersections and gaps, this new version can also detect overlaps and automatically correct any of these problems. Correcting these problems ensures that the analysis you perform will be accurate, from area calculations to geographic queries.
Another new process added in v6.5 is Snap/Thin, the automatic removal of nodes in polygons based on how close they are together or how colinear they are. This enables you to simplify complex geographical data so that MapInfo Professional can manipulate it more quickly. A disaggregate operation has also been added to complement the existing combine operation. Now complex objects can be broken down into their component objects. Finally, some significant performance improvements have been made by more carefully optimizing which objects are examined during an operation. New Object Types Two new object types— multipoint and collection— are supported. MapInfo Professional v6.5 supports two new object types in order to provide more support for Oracle Spatial object types and compliance with Open GIS Consortium (OGC) simple object types. These are multipoint and collection. Now you can create single objects that consist of multiple points or even points, lines and polygons. This is in addition to the long-standing support for multipolylines and regions (multipolygons). These new object types are supported by the combine, disaggregate, buffer and convex hull operations. Invert Selection A feature widely requested by MapInfo Professional users and now incorporated in v6.5, the invert selection tool allows you to simply select all the objects in a table that are not selected and simultaneously unselects all the selected objects. Instead of lassoing hundreds of objects, just select the few you don’t want and then invert the selection to get all those you do. This operation is available to you as both a button on the main button pad and an option in the query menu. New TIN-based Interpolator The new TIN-based interpolator is better suited for terrain. In addition to the existing Inverse- Distance-Weighting (IDW) interpolator, MapInfo Professional v6.5 also includes a Triangulated-Irregular- Network (TIN) based interpolator. By performing less smoothing and only considering adjacent values when calculating the value of a particular grid cell, the new TIN-based interpolator is much better suited for phenomena such as terrain. With TIN-based interpolation, your terrain has more definition and more “depth” making your maps more topologically accurate. New Projections To better support existing data that you may want to use with MapInfo Professional, v6.5 now supports two new projections: oblique aspects of Azimuthal Equal- Area which is used by USGS, and Cassini-Soldner, a popular projection in Europe. With v6.5, the cursor location can be displayed in Military Grid Reference System coordinates. Usability Enhancements Simple enhancements have been made to MapInfo Professional to improve usability. They include: display style override for raster images; zoom layering preferences for raster and grid images; ‘most-recently-used files’ list expanded from 4 to 10; and, ‘view Entire Layer’ default changed to ‘All Layers’. Tool Enhancements MapInfo Professional v6.5 includes two new tools and significant enhancements to others. New Tools Coordinate Extractor simplifies the process of extracting coordinate values from geographic objects and inserting them into columns in a table. Grid Tools provide options to convert grid files from any format into the MapInfo native, binary grid file format. This can greatly improve performance. The tool also creates new grid files from tables of regularly spaced point objects, and it provides an info tool with display x, y and z values for the cursor location. Enhanced HTML Image Map has been enhanced in v6.5 to support point and line objects, in addition to polygons. It can also create image maps from multiple layers of data, create hyperlinks from data values, and combine landing pages into a single HTML document. MapInfo Professional v6.5 now allows you to place a scale bar in a layout window and provides more control over the appearance of the scale bar. MapBasic As with all MapInfo Professional upgrades, MapInfo ® MapBasic ® has been updated to control these new features. There are new statements for the prism map and the new object processing capabilities and updated statements for raster image control. MapInfo Professional v6.5 brings you new capabilities to make your maps look real and new tools and enhancements to add convenience to your tasks—including new ways to add visual impact to your maps; new ways of cleaning and modifying your data; and improvements in working with spatial objects. Andrew Dressel is a MapInfo founder and product manager for MapInfo Professional. Microsoft, Windows and the Windows Logo are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. SPRING 2001 MAPINFO MAGAZINE www.mapinfo.com/magazine 15
Page 1 and 2: 6 MapInfo Delivers Today’s ‘Kil
Page 3 and 4: MapInfo M A G A Z I N E VOLUME 6, N
Page 5 and 6: The world is on the brink of mass a
Page 7 and 8: ALCATEL’S iMLS LOCATION-BASED SER
Page 9 and 10: ALCATEL, CONTINUED FROM PAGE 7 GENI
Page 11 and 12: Take the express route to 3G revenu
Page 13: PSA Founded in 1988, PSA works hand
Page 17 and 18: STEP MAPBASIC RESULTS: 2 {blank win
Page 20 and 21: 20 T E C H N I C A L F E A T U R E
Page 22 and 23: NOVEMBER 12-15, 2001 RENAISSANCE OR
Page 24 and 25: oMapInfo User Groups 24 Arizona Use
Page 26 and 27: 26 News &Trends CONTINUED FROM PAGE

mapinfomag_spring200..

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?