Pitney Bowes MapInfo Manager enables organisations to very easily build and manage a catalogue that represents a single point of truth for their spatial data. This catalogue, built on open standards, facilitates the easy discovery and sharing of spatial data for all who may need it, internally or externally to your organisation.

The Benefits of MapInfo Manager

• MapInfo Manager makes your spatial data easy for all to find, understand, share and use.
• Find and exploit “hidden” data assets you were unaware of.
• Save costs by avoiding duplicate data collection or purchases.
• Built on open standards, available to a wide variety of systems/users.
• Helps to meet EU INSPIRE requirements for metadata collection and sharing.

Pitney Bowes® MapInfo® Manager™ is a server-based application that provides the necessary tools to build and manage a centralised library for your organisation’s spatial data assets. This includes creating one or more searchable catalogues of spatial data as well as tools to very easily populate and maintain these catalogues with useful information about your datasets. Your data becomes easy to find, understand, share and use for all who may benefit from it.

Metadata – The Key to Realising the Potential of Your Data

The core benefit of MapInfo Manager is its catalogue of your organisation’s enterprise spatial data. This catalogue consists of metadata which is the information describing your data. Metadata can include information such as the vintage, source, owner, origin, location, geographic area and more. It essentially establishes a data set’s purpose for anyone who discovers the data. A catalogue of metadata assists users in finding and accessing the data they require as well as understand the suitability of a data set for a specific purpose. If there are questions about the data, then the “owner” or custodian of the data can also become known through the metadata.

The metadata catalogues created in MapInfo Manager are built using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalogue Services Web (CSW) standard. These can be searched by MapInfo Professional users (working with the Catalogue Browser capability introduced in MapInfo Professional v10.5) along with other OGC compliant CSW service applications.

Creating and Editing Metadata is Easy!

With MapInfo Manager, building a library of metadata is easy. Some of the metadata can be obtained in an automated manner and done in a bulk collection effort, referred to as harvesting. Harvesting is useful for those metadata items that can be determined in an automated fashion.

In addition, certain metadata fields may be common to some or all of your datasets (such as the owner or contact person). Repeated values can be applied automatically through the use of templates.

Finally, edits and modifications to metadata can be done to individual records or to multiple records at once.

Share – Simplify – Control

MapInfo Manager enables data custodians, GIS managers and IT administrators to control how data is published, how it can be discovered and how it can be accessed by a targeted user base.

Multiple catalogues can be created and shared. Having multiple catalogues offers the ability to publish information on specific data sets to specific audiences. For example, an organisation might wish to share certain data sets with the general public (as required by INSPIRE in Europe). This same organisation may have additional datasets that are used internally. A different catalogue can be created for each of these two different data sharing requirements.

Standards Compliant

MapInfo Manager adheres to various standards to maximise system and agency interoperability including ISO 19115 and Gemini 2.1 for metadata statements, OGC for catalogue and data publishing, and many others. For those organisations directly or indirectly impacted by the European Union INSPIRE directive, MapInfo Manager utilises the necessary standards to meet your INSPIRE requirements.

IMPROVE THE MANAGEMENT OF YOUR SPATIAL DATA ASSETS TODAY.

MapInfo Manager v1.2: Summary of Improvements

New Features

• Support for SQL Server and PostGIS databases

Tables and views can now be harvested and synchronized from SQL Server 2008 and PostGIS database management systems. Options include accessing spatial data only or all tables, using MAPCATALOG, and providing a custom query to harvest specific records.

• Harvest non-spatial data!

You can now harvest additional non-spatial data types such as DOC, PDF and ZIP files. This is useful when building a metadata library where you would like supporting files and documentation alongside your spatial data.

• Harvest MWS format workspaces

MapInfo Manager now harvests the MWS workspace format. This is the format that is used by Stratus and our developer tools.

• Metadata Editing: New “Find and Replace” capability

Records can now be edited via a powerful find and replace operation. Text strings in multiple records can be searched and updated by matching partial and whole words, by specifying upper or lower case and by using wildcards. This improves the overall ease of use and reduced the time needed to maintain metadata.

• More control over synchronising metadata

MapInfo Manager previously had the ability to synchronise (or refresh) the metadata in a particular folder in your system. New options for this process allow more control over the operation than previously. You can choose the file types to harvest/synchronise, and whether to apply templates and whether or not to place the newly harvested data into any of your CSW catalogs.

• Improved integration with MapInfo Professional

MapInfo Manager offers improved integration MapInfo Professional (and potentially with other client applications). MapInfo Pro users can set up a connection to the MapInfo Manager. What is specifically new in version 1.2 is the ability to add new data to the MapInfo Manager library directly from MapInfo Professional.

• Easier use of thumbnail images of your data

MapInfo Manager now provides a location where you can store thumbnail images of your data. Thumbnail images can be an important aid when presenting metadata to end users and this new capability makes this process easier.

• Security

Application-level security is now offered in MapInfo Manager. This is an optional configuration that, when implemented, will require users to log in with a username and password.

Enhancements to existing capabilities

• More metadata fields added:

Additional metadata fields for ISO/GMD/INSPIRE and GEMINI 2.1 have been added, including spatial resolution, temporal and vertical extents.

• Improved productivity: Harvesting data and adding to a catalog can now be done in a single operation

Harvesting data and adding metadata records to Catalogs is now available as a combined operation for more efficient data management. The option to add records to Catalogs separately from harvesting is still available.

• Usability improvement: Cancel the harvest and synchronise operations.
• Multiple points of contact

Multiple points of contact can now be added to a metadata record. Each contact's information is contained in a separate tab within the Point of Contact field.

• Provide more information about the catalogs

The catalog owner and provider information are now able to be entered when a catalog is set up. This info helps users to identify the owners of catalogs.

• Integration with MapInfo Stratus

Named maps and tables can be exported to Stratus.

• Now available in Danish and Finnish
• Run MapInfo Manager as a Windows Service

This is a technical detail but important. Essentially this means MapInfo Manager can run in the background without having a window that the user will see. To explain it another way if this option is used then the end user would not see a DOS window nor would they be able to switch to the MapInfo Manager window. An example as to where this is a benefit is it may help to avoid people shutting down the software accidentally.

MapInfo Manager v1.2 was released November 2011

Contact sales for further details.