ThinkGeo Blog

Today one of my colleagues, Val Guillou, released a very interesting white paper titled How to use GRID with Map Suite.  I have seen GRID before, but never realized all of the analysis you can do with GRID until I read Val's white paper.

In case you aren't familiar with GRID, it's a really neat way of taking point data readings and interpolating them to produce an attractive visual representation of the data.  The map image below represents farmland, and shows the soil quality based upon two separate point data values (pH & Magnesium).  The map below was created using GRID and IDW interpolation, however, you're free to implement virtually any interpolation algorithms with GRID.  This opens the door for you to create some really cool maps.

As I think about various ways to use GRID technology in conjunction with GIS and mapping, several applications come to mind.  To name just a few examples: temperature maps, price maps and production maps could all be enhanced with the use of GRID.  I'm anxious to hear what other applications you think GRID would be a good fit for, so feel free to leave comments below. 

Technorati Tags: GRID, GIS, Map Suite

Have you ever found yourself searching the web looking for GIS mapping data? 

I know over the years that I have spent countless hours looking for just the right data to meet my needs.  Typically the first place I visit when looking for publicly available nationwide coverage is the National Atlas website run by the USGS.  I wish every GIS data site was organized as well as this one.  In my opinion the best thing about this site is that you can download the shapefile map data layers, and in addition, these map data layers are broken up into several easy-to-understand categories that include:

• Agriculture
• Biology
• Boundaries
• Climate
• Environment
• Geology
• History
• Map Reference
• People
• Transportation
• Water

Even though the National Atlas doesn't provide the more detailed data sets like street level coverages, it's a great resource to draw upon when building a mapping or GIS application.

Technorati Tags: National Atlas, Shapefile, GIS Data

As ThinkGeo's lead graphic designer, one of the projects I've worked on extensively is the Map Suite Icon Library, a collection of over 5,000 icons (and growing) you can use to lend a visual flair to your maps and GIS applications.  The library contains a wide variety of imagery, ranging from vehicles and places to people, road signs and weather symbols.

Since the initial release of the Icon Library, we've worked to identify additional icons and categories that would help further expand the library's variety.  Our customers have been a great help in recommending new imagery, including dashboard-style icons that indicate a vehicle's engine temperature, oil pressure and more, and a set of icons representing computer activities like "save," "open" and "print."  You can always see the complete list of all the icons in our library by checking out our Icon Samples page.

One of the best parts about our Icon Library expansion efforts is that we offer these enhancements at no additional cost to anyone who already purchased the library.  This helps make your purchase of the Icon Library future-proof, and demonstrates the kind of commitment to satisfaction -- both before and after the sale -- that ThinkGeo has become known for.

Now, I'd like to give our readers an opportunity to help shape the direction of further additions to the Map Suite Icon Library.  What icons would you like to see?  What new image categories would you benefit from?  Do you have a special project that needs icons for a specific purpose?  Let us know, and your request might get added to the Icon Library.

To tell us what icons you'd like to see, simply leave a comment on this entry below!

Over the years it has sometimes been difficult to visually show customers how our products can fit together to build various types of .NET applications.  Since Map Suite can support several .NET application types including Pocket PC, Desktop, Web, Web Services, Windows Services and console applications, a lot of times it's not clear which Map Suite product is best suited for the task.  Enlisting the help of our very talented graphic designer, we now have a Map Suite product relationship diagram that visually shows how the different Map Suite products can fit together to build various types of .NET applications.

Now I know what they mean when they say a picture is worth a 1000 words!

I have always been a big fan of slashdot.org for getting my daily dose of technical news, and now I have slashgeo.org for keeping up on geospatial news.  Over the years I have run across this site a time or two, but there didn't seem to be much activity on it until lately.  The past few weeks I have been monitoring it more closely and they have had great postings.  I hope they can keep it up, because it's been difficult in the past to find a good centralized location for spatial news. 

Check it out and help the slashgeo.org community grow!

Technorati Tags: slashgeo, GIS

Today I released a new white paper and code explaining how to build scalable GIS applications with web services.  The paper gives sample code for both the web service and the client application using Map Suite Web & Engine Editions.  In this case the client application was a web application, but the same concepts can be used to consume the web service in a desktop application.  This type of application architecture works really well for both scalability and allowing you centralize the large base map datasets.

Below is a screen shot of what the result of the sample client application look like.  We even used the new Map Suite Icon library for the customer icons :)

Technorati Tags: Web Services, GIS Programming, ThinkGeo

Well it's official, the ThinkGeo Blog is finally live! 

After several conversations about how we could use blogging to better communicate with our customers and the community in general, we are ready to launch.  The main focus of this blog will be to allow people within the ThinkGeo organization to talk about cool topics like GIS (Geographic Information Systems), programming and mapping technologies, to name a few.  In addition, we also hope this blog will engage our customers on how to utilize our technologies to implement great solutions.

Technorati tags: GIS, ThinkGeo