TerraGo has just released the version 6.7 of most of our core products which focus on bringing GIS-Lite functionality to document workflows under the aegis of our OpenGeoPDF initiative. That’s a mouthful, so I guess it wouldn’t be too bad to shorten it to version 6.7 of our OpenGeoPDF products. In this release, we’ve added two functions which significantly enhance the GIS-Lite capabilities provided by the recently-added Identify tool in Toolbar: search and update of GeoPackage feature attributes.

Search

Search has become an essential paradigm. My once punctilious management of email, each incoming message being tagged and routed to its own place based on an arcane library of rules accumulated over more years than I care to admit in Emacs Gnus has been replaced by a couple of rules for alerting me to things of current urgency, but otherwise I just search to find in an sea of unsorted emails Outlook, at least at work. With Toolbar 6.7, you can search attached GeoPackage for features matching what you type in the search field, get a list of matches, and then you can click the match to see where it is on the map. Double click the match and you’ll zoom to that feature. We had to add additional metadata to the GeoPDF documents to make this all go, and that’s some of what went into Publisher 6.7, including persisting the field names that ArcMap thinks is the most useful to identify a particular feature. Again, using OpenGeoPDF to tie Publisher to its client application Toolbar helps illustrate the connection. I hope Esri clones the feature in their Identify tool — it’s pretty damn useful and cool.

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If you saw GIS-Lite in isolation, you might imagine it to be pretty much anything not quite GIS. We’re starting to use the word at TerraGo to help explain part of what we do for people — let them transform what would otherwise be a static document into a lightweight location-enabled interactive application. But that’s a mouthful, so we call it GIS-Lite.

One of the reasons we are thinking in terms of GIS-Lite is to illustrate how at once a GeoPDF document with TerraGo Toolbar is not GIS, but is an intimate connection to the GIS and the person who created the document in the first place. When talking with folks about GeoPDF and Toolbar, people make comparisons to pseudo-alternatives like web applications or lightweight GIS software, which shows we failed to make our point: it’s not an either-or proposition. Web apps and GIS programs are distinct and don’t really compete directly at all, although there might be a superficial feature comparison here or there. Paper and PowerPoint are the competition. The real question is would the documents you create with ArcMap be more valuable if people could use Toolbar to take advantage of the geospatial context and data used to create that document? More often than not, the answer is a resounding yes.

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