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The South Carolina Forestry Commission has been looking for a low cost desktop mapping application for use by its field foresters in preparing forest stewardship and other forest management plans. After several years of looking at what was available, the Commission selected a product from Caliper Corporation called Maptitude® -- a Geographic Information System for Windows. Maptitude® cost 1/3 to ¼ as much as some of the more popular GIS programs, includes more geographic data, has a smoother interface, and a routing module. Maptitude® can be interfaced with GPS units, import a wide variety of raster (image) formats, import other GIS and CAD application formats, and includes an extensive street database layer. All GIS applications have a steep learning curve, but Maptitude® is a relatively easy-to-use package through the use of Create-a-Map Wizard(tm), drawing tools and other features. Maptitude® can read Excel spreadsheets, dBASE files, text files, and any ODBC compliant data source to link data in a table to map features or locations. As one independent reviewer noted "Maptitude...delivers high-end GIS steak at hamburger prices."
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