What's SuperMap GIS?

SuperMap GIS is a large GIS package developed by SuperMap Software Co., Ltd., which covers a wide range of products, including Desktop GIS, Component GIS, Service GIS, Mobile GIS, Spatial Database Engine, Navigation Application Development Platform as well as related spatial data generation, processing and management tools. Through continuous technological innovation and marketing promotion, SuperMap has been able to provide a complete GIS platform that can be applied in various industries. More and more GIS application developers have successfully developed their solutions based on SuperMap GIS products.

Design Concept of SuperMap GIS Products

In the course of GIS software development and evolution, the ideology has undergone a transition from cartography focused to information focused and the methodology from module based GIS to component based GIS. Up to now, GIS has been applied to various application systems, and has become more an information tool than a cartography tool. Today, spatial information has become important information in personal life, enterprise management and government management, and more and more information systems have to deal with all kinds of spatial information. It is of key essence to spatially enable those systems. Thus, SuperMap advocates and adopts some important concepts in the designing process of SuperMap GIS products.

　　◆ Open and Co-operation strategy

GIS is supposed to be a distributed system in nature. It is an information infrastructure which needs multilateral collaborations in construction. SuperMap GIS is oriented to GIS platform software and the GIS development tools under various environments. It is committed to fully supporting GIS application development and exploring the market with the business partners. Therefore, the Open and Co-operation strategy is not only a concept of SuperMap, but also is implemented in our products. SuperMap GIS offers open and scalable software architectures on the base of service-oriented idea, enabling developers and users not only to set up their own application systems to meet their own needs but also to develop professional software products with independent copyrights based on SuperMap GIS to obtain a wider valued-added space.

Figure 1.1.1.1 SuperMap’s Open Concept

　　◆ Universal GIS Core

The rapid progress of IT has constantly influenced the development of GIS technology. In order to accommodate the changes of future technology and meet the fast-growing requirements of applications, SuperMap comes up with a new concept - Universal GIS, which is a new idea for GIS fundamental platform development.

The fundamental of Universal GIS is to separate all GIS functionalities and algorithms from the information technology they are based on through designing a sophisticated software architecture to make the two parts independent and disengaged from each other. Therefore, the pith of Universal GIS is to establish a universal GIS core (UGC) that implements the core functionalities of GIS, which is relatively unnecessary to change or not tend to be affected by rapid technical change. On the basis of UGC, it is easy to accommodate this change by just implementing or adjusting peripheral function modules and user interface, which greatly reduces technology evolvement cost. This model can be simplified to refer to as “core/shell” model. The architecture of Universal GIS software is shown below.

Figure 1.1.1.2 Architecture of Universal GIS

Based on UGC, various GIS software products can be encapsulated, including Component GIS, Service GIS, and Desktop GIS etc. In particular, the component GIS and Service GIS can either be encapsulated based on .net framework or Java platform.

The theory of Universal GIS has been successfully practiced. SuperMap GIS 6R product family contains some software based on Universal GIS technology, in which SuperMap iServer Java has already been applied in lots of GIS projects. With the development of Universal GIS, more new GIS products based on it will be launched to provide better services for the users.

　　◆ Service GIS

What is Service GIS? Simply put, Service GIS is component GIS that runs on the Web. On the server part, components are deployed to be services on the Web, to enable sharing and reusing; on the client part, these Web GIS services can be aggregated and used to develop different applications.

The software engineering method has evolved through four main periods, process oriented, object oriented, component oriented, and service oriented software designing and developing. In the process oriented period, processing by commands took the predominance. In the object oriented period, graphical desktop software populated, e.g. desktops developed based on C++ and OOP. In the component oriented period, components based on the COM technology abounded, e.g. SuperMap Objects. In the service oriented period, SOA based GIS platforms, in some way Service GIS, will predominate.

From component oriented to service oriented is a natural evolvement where service GIS is combined with traditional GIS development approaches to give GIS development a jump.

All featured in the Web era, WebGIS, Server GIS, and Service GIS have taken their place in different stages of this era. The early stage featured WebMapping, the middle stage featured WebGIS and Server GIS, while the advanced stage featured Service GIS.

Service GIS is becoming the mainstream GIS development mode. To adjust for this mode, new challenges in the following aspects need to be addressed: cross platform support, high concurrency, stability, flexibility in development and deployment, high usability, security, disaster backup/recovery, service management, etc.

To enable cross platform access to services, SuperMap adopts the Universal GIS core which is based on the Standard Template Library technology to provide support for multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Solaris, AIX, and HP UX, and provides support for service publishing and aggregating on the service level by following a wide range of WebService standards, including REST, SOAP, WMS, WFS, GeoRSS, and KML, to enable interoperability on different platforms.

To address the high concurrency featured in Service GIS, SuperMap has developed service GIS products that support 64-bit computers, multi-core computing, and adopted non-redundant multi-server clustering technology and multi-level caching technology.

SuperMap service GIS has a high-performance core and a loosely coupled service architecture. To ensure a highly stable system, a complete series of tests, comprising unit testing, load testing, and duration testing is carried out. To ensure the integrity of interfaces, an auto testing platform and an online diagnosing module are adopted.

On-demand service delivery is one of the most important features of SOA, which enables Service GIS to deploy resources flexibly, and facilitate system integration, heterogeneous interaction and version migration.

Service GIS improves the system usability. The system down time is greatly reduced, through cluster-based load balancing, fault tolerance, and transferring on error. Distributed computing supports building distributed non-redundant backup service sites. Web services of different types can be aggregated.

By leveraging the mainstream IT technologies, SuperMap Service GIS also improves the system security, enables high-efficient disaster backup/recovery, and flexible management, providing well designed solutions for your GIS needs.

SuperMap GIS Product Families

SuperMap GIS 6R covers a range of GIS products, including the desktop GIS, component GIS development platform, spatial database engine, service GIS development platform, mobile GIS development platform, navigation application development platform and data processing platform.

　　◆ Desktop GIS: Includes SuperMap Viewer, SuperMap Express, SuperMap Deskpro, and a completely new SuperMap Deskpro .NET which is developed based on the UGC core with the integration of 2D and 3D GIS capabilities.

　　◆ Component GIS Development Platform:This includes several Component GIS products based on different component models, including COM based product -- SuperMap Objects, .NET based product - SuperMap Objects .NET and Java based product -- SuperMap Objects Java..

　　◆ Spatial Database Engine:SuperMap SDX+ supports most of the mainstream commercial RDBMS, enabling an efficient and reliable access to spatial data. SuperMap has released a free database engine product, SuperMap OGDC (Open Geospatial Database Connectivity), that can be used to access the SuperMap SDX+ spatial database and third party spatial databases.

　　◆ Service GIS Development Platform:includes SuperMap IS .NET, SuperMap iServer .NET, and SuperMap iServer Java.

　　◆ Mobile GIS Development Platform: includes eSuperMap, which is open to customizing a wild range of mobile GIS applications for mobile and embeddable devices.

　　◆ Navigation Application Development Platform: includes SuperNavigation Engine, which is an open development tool for customizing professional navigation applications for different mobile devices.

　　◆ Data Processing Platform:This includes D-Producer for data authoring, D-Builder for database building, D-Checker for data quality control, D-Manager for spatial database management, FieldMapper for field work data acquisition and SuperMap Floor for estate survey.

Figure 1.1.2.1 SuperMap GIS Products Family

Figure 1.1.2.2 SuperMap GIS Products Roadmap

International GIS Brand

International market is highly valued by SuperMap Software Co., Ltd. In 2000, SuperMap 2000 Japanese version was simultaneously released with its Chinese version. Therefore, SuperMap became the first exported Chinese GIS software platform. By now, SuperMap Japan co, Ltd. has established good partnership with over one thousand Japanese governments, institutes, enterprises etc., such as NTT, Japan Railway, The Tokyo Electric Power, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, NEC, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sumitomo Corporation, University of Tsukuba, University of Tokyo, and Japanese National Institute for Environmental Studies.

Apart from Japanese market, SuperMap GIS actively gets involved in the market of Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, India, Italy, Kazakhstan as well as Sweden, South Africa etc.

So far, SuperMap products have covered the GIS markets worldwide, from Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Iran, India, to South Africa, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sweden, Denmark, Cuba, and Canada, to name a few.

Figure 1.1.3.1 SuperMap World Market