Features of SuperMap GIS

SuperMap GIS is an integrated collection of GIS software products widely used in various application environments ranging from mobile device to personal computer, from workstation to server, from stand-alone to network, from LAN to WAN and so on. SuperMap GIS leverages many up-to-the-minute techniques, and is a full range GIS software platform keeping close pace with IT development. SuperMap GIS has many essential features, including unified technical core,

Unified Data Model

All SuperMap GIS products employ the same data model, which can be used directly in all SuperMap GIS products without any data conversion (except that the mobile GIS platform need some simple conversion of data in order to make such data fit the mobile environment better). Thus, no extra workload is needed and no loss of information occurs when sharing data among different SuperMap GIS products.

Figure 5 All SuperMap GIS products share the unified data model

GIS Server for Enterprise Applications

The Service GIS development platform products are launched in SuperMap GIS 2008 for enterprise applications, which are based on SOA and provides an integrated solution in customized service, personalized service integration, seamless aggregation with third party service, Web development, configuration, deployment and management for enterprise application systems. The application built based on SuperMap Service GIS development platform can obtain seamless integration capability of enterprise Service GIS services, and advanced service management competence, which enable the application to inter-access and integrate with the third party systems and easily be extended.

Figure 6 Requirements and corresponding platforms

Multi-Source Spatial Data Support

　　◆ Conversion of multiple data formats

SuperMap GIS has powerful data interchange ability. It can exchange data with some other GIS and CAD software through an import/export data pump. Not only E00, MIF, DXF and other common text interchange formats, but also TAB (MapInfo), SHP (ArcView), DWG (AutoCAD), DGN (MicroStation) and other binary data formats are all supported by SuperMap GIS. In addition, it also supports lots of image data formats such as TIFF, GEO-TIFF, BMP, JPEG, IMG (Erdas), MrSID, ECW, etc.

Figure 7 Main vector and raster data formats supported in SuperMap GIS

　　◆  Seamless integration of multi-source spatial data (SIMS)

The problem of multi-format data source integration has been one of the most challenging problems in GIS development, since various data formats in different geographic information systems has made information sharing difficult. SuperMap GIS has an essential Seamless Integration of Multi-source Spatial Data (SIMS) technique which allows direct access to multiple data formats without any conversion. In addition to the original data format of SuperMap; other vector data formats such as DWG, DXF and DGN and raster formats such as BMP, JPEG, TIF, RAW etc. can be directly accessed in SuperMap GIS products. This technique has features of direct access to multi-format data, data format independent integration, data location independent integration and multi-source data integrated management etc.

SIMS adopts an open automatic engine loading technique, allowing specific customized data engine so that SuperMap GIS can directly access the user-defined data formats. This technique is of high significance for specific industries, the particular data format of which is highly confidential and not supposed to be disclosed.

Figure 8 Seamless Integration of Multi-source Spatial Data

　　◆  XML

SuperMap GIS completely supports GML 3.0 standard, each dataset or geometric object can be output into XML strings. Meanwhile geometric objects can be created from XML strings. In this way, the data generated in SuperMap can be interchanged with other software that supports XML, and geospatial data can be transmitted over the Internet in the form of XML strings.

Furthermore, XML is supported in the storage of workspace. The format of SuperMap GIS workspace can be either stored in binary format (.smw) or XML format (.sxw) so that easy workspace maintenance and fast transmissions over the Internet are possible.

Massive Spatial Data Management Technique

SuperMap GIS is designed to support enterprise applications from the right beginning. It innovatively supports massive spatial data management with several essential techniques, including multi-level hybrid spatial indexing technique and massive image data management technique etc.

　　◆ Multi-level hybrid spatial indexing technique

Massive spatial data management is a critical technical problem for modern GIS software. It is one of the main factors to determine whether the GIS software can be used for a large-scale project or not. Spatial data indexing is a key technique for implementing massive data management. SuperMap GIS innovatively developed the multiple hybrid indexing technique based on quad tree, R tree and grid indexing technologies, which overcomes the disadvantage of traditional single indexing technique and lays a solid foundation for massive spatial data management.

　　◆ Massive Image Data Management Technique

Image data is a most important data source of GIS applications. With development of high resolution remote sensing technology and its increasingly wide applications, the size of a high resolution image of a certain region is growing very fast from hundreds of MB to hundreds of GB and even as much as several TB. Therefore, an efficient storage strategy and fast presentation of massive image data becomes a major obstacle in GIS applications. SuperMap responds to this challenge and successfully developed a series of massive image data management techniques such as massive image data storage technique, MrSID and ECW compressed image formats support as well as cross-platform massive image data compression technique - SuperMap Image Tower (SIT).