News

Product Review of the TatukGIS Editor

February 07, 2008

This product review of the TatukGIS Editor product was written by Prof. Stark Hans-Jörg Stark with the University of Applied Sciences in Muttenz, Switzerland and first published (in German language) in the German magazine GIS BUSINESS. This review was completed in October, 2007, and reflects the latest version of the Editor product that was available at that time (version 1.9.2).

The English language translation of this article provided below was prepared by Dr. Andreas Rinker with the DigSyLand-Institute (www.digsyland.de) located in Husby, Germany. Dr. Rinker is also a TatukGIS customer and reseller of TatukGIS software products in Germany via the German language web site www.tatukgis.de.This English language translation is republished here with the permission of GIS BUSINESS magazine.

At the end of the product review, Professor Stark presents a number of "wish list" suggestions for the Editor product. The translations of these suggestions appear below. A response or comment from TatukGIS is inserted after some of the suggestions.

Wishlist:

  1. The support of various projections or change of projection would be very valuable, especially for the combination of WMS with own (vector-) data. According to the producer this feature is planned for the upcoming version. [TatukGIS: Advanced coordinate system support will be provided in the 2.0 version, which will be made available to all Editor customers as a free upgrade. Along with other features, the coordinate system support includes on-the-fly reprojection of WMS layers.]
  2. The support of several map windows would be convenient for the use of the software.
  3. A connection to spatial databases such as Oracle Spatial or PostgreSQL/ PostGIS would be desirable. The producer promised to include this new functionality in the upcoming version of the development kernel as well. [TatukGIS: Read/write support for Oracle Spatial/Locator was added to the Editor in late November 2007 and support for ArcSDE and Personal Geodatabase layers was added in January 2008. Read/write support for PostGIS will be provided in the version 2.0. ]
  4. The concept of spatial selection via clipboard should be reassessed. Using this method a dynamic update of queries, e.g. by changing attributes, and the selection across several layers, is impossible. [TatukGIS: As of the version 2.0, this sort of advanced feature customization (selection across multiple layers) will be possible via scripting. The version 2.0 will support customization with Pascal and Basic scripting.]
  5. An automatic pursuit of lines along existing geometry would be very helpful when digitalizing in the snap mode. This would also reduce topological mistakes while acquiring. [TatukGIS: This is to be considered.]
  6. The manual editing in the print preview (layout) window could be far more attractive if several map windows with different (detailed) views were displayed at the same time.
  7. When acquiring areas in the orthogonal mode the geometries should also be able to be automatically finished orthogonally.
  8. The limit of eight color possibilities for bar or pie-charts should be dropped. [TatukGIS: We will consider this suggestion.]
  9. During geometrical operations (union / split) there should be the possibility of separating the attributes, for example splitting an area proportionally. [TatukGIS: This will be considered, but it also represents an example of a custom feature that could be implemented via scripting in the version 2.0. ]
  10. The possibility to include map services such as Google Maps or VirtualEarth as background data would be very nice. [TatukGIS: TatukGIS would very much like to enable the Editor to open Google Earth as a layer within the program. We could easily add this feature, but our understanding is that this would violate the Google Earth API licensing restrictions. We once floated this idea on the Google Earth API forum (approximately one year ago) and the overwhelming response on the forum was that the Google licensing does not permit this. We wrote to Google for clarification on this point and they never responded. TatukGIS would be pleased to add this sort of feature if we can feel comfortable that doing so is compliant with the licensing of the web mapping service. ]


TatukGIS Editor

Introduction

TatukGIS Editor is a desktop product designed for visualization, coverage, processing, and simple analysis of spatial data. The latest available product version at the time of this article is version 1.9.2. The TatukGIS Editor can be classified in the category of low-cost GIS. The following report introduces the Product and its significant features.

Types of users who do not deal with GIS-products on an every-day basis, but who still require GIS products for their work, depend on products that are easy to handle. Depending on the field of application and the task, inexpensive systems offering a somewhat limited range of functionality at a low cost, are in great demand. The beneficial relationship between financial expense and pragmatic and technical output is essential. This is the realm of the TatukGIS Editor.

TatukGIS, founded in 2000, is a company headquartered in Gdynia (Poland). The company is focused on the supply of tools for GIS-relevant issues, especially in the field of software development. The core component of the TatukGIS technology is the TatukGIS Developer Kernel (DK).

Other TatukGIS products, such as the TatukGIS Viewer and the TatukGIS Editor, are based on this DK-technology. The TatukGIS Viewer is a free GIS-Viewer. The TatukGIS Editor, which is available for purchase, is similar to the TatukGIS Viewer, but enhanced with the potential for graphic and attributive data collection. Furthermore, a GIS Internet Map Server based on the same technology is also available. The following presents the functionality of the TatukGIS Editor without specifically pointing out the differences between it and the free TatukGIS Viewer.

Range of functions

User interface. In addition to the main map window and the menus, the user interface provides several so-called panels that can be switched on and off. These panels cover aspects such as...

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