GIS for the Masses

According to an article in Forbes, people make 150 million maps a day with Esri® software. 150 million.

It’s amazing when you consider the unmatched value of GIS for helping us better shape our understanding of the world we live in. The only thing that makes it more powerful is making it easier to share that understanding.

GIS systems create so much more than flat maps. But out of those 150 million maps made today, how many of those end up shared as paper or even a static image on a Powerpoint slide? What is the cost to train people to be GIS experts, cartographers, geographers, scientists, analysts, engineers, designers, planners and more? How can we leverage all that talent and all that knowledge if we lose so much information on the way out of the GIS system while sharing it with the non-GIS masses. What if you could unlock those maps and let end users truly interact with the data behind the map to better answer their questions? For free.

Well that’s our mission at TerraGo and our customers tell us it makes a world of difference for the value of their GIS and the great work done by their GIS experts. When you start sharing interactive GeoPDF maps, you’re sharing a portable lightweight GIS application, one that’s available to non-experts and lets them truly interact with all that rich data to better understand it, form hypotheses and answer questions that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. You can share it anybody anywhere and they can use it with only free software (Adobe Reader and TerraGo Toolbar). You can share it via web sites or cloud networks. And you can take it completely offline. That’s what we call GIS-Lite and it make your GIS more sharable and your GIS work even more valuable to the people that need it most.

Tags: ArcGIS, collaboration, david basil, Esri, GeoPDF, geospatial, GIS, GIS-Lite, mapping, PDF, technology, TerraGo

Categories: arcgis, esri, GeoPDF, geospatial, GIS, mapping, technology, terrago

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2015 at 9:55 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.