Landcad Technologies

Alfred,Visualization is, I concur, a grossly underdeveloped aspect of GIS. Smallworld has produced some pretty good results at visualization: the GIS itself, CASE tool, Schematics Generator, Spatial Intelligence, etc. My observation about all of these is that they require a fairly high level of training to operate, and are therefore not available to "the masses", and are, by now, “old school”.I think Google Maps has done a wonderful job of lowering the training required to do some very sophisticated analysis. Leveraging the work that Google has done, there’s a local guy who’s taken public domain data and done some really exiting analysis and presentation of what’s visible to a person from any point on the terrestrial earth: http://www.heywhatsthat.com [not so exciting if the vantage point is from the flat, plain states though--the interface could use some polishing, but for a privately developed site, it’s impressive]. The data were all preexisting; he’s done the analysis and created a graphically descriptive display of the metadata that is novel and accessible to the lay person. The part of the human brain dealing with visual input is relatively large and well developed. With a couple of million years’ practice, we’ve become good at recognizing visual relationships. Let’s better mash-up that engine with the GIS. How can we engineers, with all the tools we have at our disposal, make visible, for a greater population, the very expensive data that our clients have painstakingly gathered? The data are there. We need to break out of old thought processes and develop some new ones, as was done at the above website. I suspect it may be easier for those just entering the work force to come up with new visualizations (OTOH, heywatsthat.com was developed by a veteran of the work force).I like your posts. They keep me thinking.Regards,Bruce MorehouseYour XML visualization tool is great. It begins to address Smallworld’s functionality hole of missing XML tools.