Exponare (MapInfo Web Mapping) in the Wild

I don’t believe I’ve seen (or know I’d seen) an Exponare local government app in recent memory. But an article in GCN highlights the use of GIS in Cumberland County, NC and notes it’s in use. So I had a look.

The app offers quite a lot and if you’ve seen MapInfo it’s a very familiar interface. There are three columns in the legend for visible, selectable and labelled, for example, that you don’t see too often in desktop or online apps, for example.

One particular item that struck me - across the top of the map window are buttons labelled “Virtual Maps,” “Outlook” and “Word…” which allow viewing the data in Google Maps/Bing Maps (note to developers: need to update that from Virtual Earth in the mouseover text), and pasting the map in Outlook or Word respectively. I can’t be sure what these do as I don’t have those apps on my Mac.

I also like the print options which included different layouts (with and without the map) and the opportunity to title the map/report as you like. (My students just finished an exercise on Web map printing and were not too happy with the sites they explored.)

I did find two disappointments. First, the app window fully refreshed far more often that I would have liked. And, second, I could find no “help” or “tutorial”. After some poking around I did find a tutorial: it is noted on the main mapping page for the county - but the link is not highlighted. Suggestion: make that link more obvious and include a link to it from the mapping app itself. The tutorial includes several Quicktime movies that I was unable to run - but that could be because I was using an unsupported browser (Safari).