Troy, New York-based MapInfo Corp has announced the latest version of its desktop mapping software, MapInfo Professional 5.0. The company is pushing the graphical enhancements to its new version such as ‘continuous thematic shading’ – which interprets statistical information by coloring higher densities of data in darker shades, much as the rainfall intensity is measured on a weather map. Product manager Jules Moyaeret claims that continuous thematic shading was previously only available on high end systems, with shading on desktop systems limited to selected areas. Professional also offers a real time link to most ODBC open database connectivity databases such as DB2, Oracle and the company’s own SpatialWare offering – allowing data to be accessed at the desktop without downloading large files. The product also converts MapInfo data into tabular reports in Seagate Software Inc’s Crystal Reports and can export drawings from CAD packages such as AutoDesk Inc’s AutoCAD. However, the mapping software market is not growing quite as fast as the company expected. Back in 1995, when MapInfo was launching Professional 4.0 (CI No 2,810), it predicted that the worldwide market for mapping systems would be worth $1bn by the end of the century, but now Moyaeret admits that the market won’t quite meet those expectations because the market base is fragmented. MapInfo Professional will ship at the end of this month priced at $1,295.
