I spoke with Global Product Manager for Location Intelligence, Jessica Krokowski to get at the gory details of the new Map Manager product:
- It evolved from interest in the public sector in Europe (there was discussion about it in Europe last year) and the U.S., as well as the telco space (with all its mergers and acquisitions and datasets). And, since PBBI is and always has been big in telcoms, the announcement at CTIA makes sense. (Oops! My bad - I think metadata is only for public agencies. Really, I think that.)
- It's designed to support worldwide geospatial metadata standards, ISO 19115/19139 which underlie both the INSPIRE and ANSI (US) requirements.
- It's a server based product that harvests metadata (into those mandated fields) from existing MapInfo data to create a catalog that supports OGC Catalog Services Web (CSW).
- It automates a lot of the data creation, but of course, much is always manual. Thus, there was a effort to make it very usable (the beta included 90 people form about a dozen countries). Users can set up templates to fill in fields that are the same across groups of datasets.
- There's a link in each record to the dataset itself. So, once you find the data of interest, you can directly use it.
- There's not really been a metadata solution (from MapInfo or Pitney Bowes or a third party).
- It's a Windows Server solution with pricing based on the number of seats of metadata creators/editors.
- It's designed to work with/have a similar look and feel to GeoSK.
More resources:
European MapInfo Manager Website
Data Sheet (Dated 2010)
