London - 1st December, 2004 - MapInfo today announced the launch of MapInfo Gazetteer Management System (GMS) to facilitate the creation, maintenance and enterprise-wide sharing of Local Land and Property (LLPG) and Local Street (LSG) Gazetteers.

Developed by MapInfo specifically for the UK BS7666 market, following extensive consultation with BS7666 users and experts, MapInfo GMS is the successor to MapInfo’s successful BS7666 Toolbox. While retaining the look and feel of the BS7666 Toolbox, MapInfo GMS is delivered through much more robust and interoperable technology, providing local authorities with the opportunity to realise the requirement for a single, central gazetteer.

MapInfo GMS will provide a BS7666 compliant gazetteer, which other applications can access without restriction, putting live gazetteer data at the centre of corporate spatial data management. MapInfo GMS is a highly configurable system, which allows local LLPG custodians both to interpret BS7666 in their own way and to implement a potentially unlimited number of business rules that are specific to their local needs. MapInfo GMS scales from a single desktop to an entire organisation, delivering true multi-user read and write access of spatial and non-spatial data to many users concurrently.

MapInfo GMS is available in two 'Editions': Standard and Enterprise. The Standard Edition delivers fast, secure and robust facilities for the maintenance of gazetteers and the communication of gazetteer information with the national gazetteer hubs. It works within MapInfo Professional and is a client server application, which uses a .Net interface to communicate with an Oracle 9i database. Oracle Locator spatial database technology allows the spatial database to be stored within the GMS database, alongside core gazetteer attribute data.

The Enterprise Edition, also available initially as a client server application, provides open, interoperable access to gazetteer data for an unlimited number of users and systems across the whole enterprise through a completely non-proprietary data interface, allowing gazetteer data to be used in the context of a wide variety of domain specific applications. A three-tier version, designed for the full enterprise utilisation of LLPG through the use of Web Services, will be available soon.

Chris Bolam, Product Manager – Public Sector, MapInfo EMEA, comments: “Having assumed full responsibility for the development of the MapInfo BS7666 Toolbox, we’re now delighted to be able to deliver MapInfo GMS as the latest integral part of our public sector enterprise interoperability vision. Acknowledging the major investment that local authorities have made in developing their gazetteers, the launch of MapInfo GMS demonstrates our commitment to the public sector and provides a system that will help them achieve the significant benefits of more extensive sharing of gazetteer data within and indeed between local authorities. In doing so, we believe that the MapInfo GMS will also contribute to the realisation of e-Government interoperability targets.”

Key features of MapInfo GMS Standard Edition:

• Retains look and feel of MapInfo BS7666 Toolbox and uses MapInfo Professional
• Architecture provides robust and reliable multi-user editing, so there’s no need to check data in or out
• Auditing of all gazetteer changes
• Rollback state of gazetteer to a specific date and time, or import/export checkpoint
• Active Validation – Ensures gazetteer integrity and BS7666 compliance once gazetteer is in maintenance phase
• Bulk updates reduces repetitive data entry
• Improved export performance, including change-only exports

• Client Server version has Standard Edition features plus:
  • Database views that allow read-only access to the full range of gazetteer data for direct read by applications and users.
  • Database view specification is published and is guaranteed for the lifetime of the product, ensuring long term, maintenance free integration with third party systems.
• Three tier version will have Standard Edition features plus:
  • MapInfo Gazetteer Web services, which will provide the ability for third party applications to integrate with the gazetteer in an open and interoperable way
  • Gazetteer Exchange Services, which will provide the ability to push gazetteer data to external application as edits are made