I got a demo the other day from Dany Bouchard, President of DBx GEOMATICS, a Quebec-based company, about their product CartoVista. If I translated this correctly, the product means, “map view” and that’s exactly what the product does. It is not a desktop GIS but renders data from other sources using Adobe Flash to provide rich data visualization. If you didn’t know better you would think you were looking at a business intelligence software dashboard (charts, graphics, data window, etc.) that has been augmented with a map window. The strength of this product is clearly its ability to do thematic mapping in a much more visually appealing and cartographically pleasing (albeit in a digital sense) manner.
The company is a Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI) business partner so it works very easily with .TAB data. However, the product does a very slick job of updating each data window (chart, graph, etc.) as the user selects or zooms to a particular region. Labeling of data is very good and the dynamic analysis tools are extremely useful. Version 2.0 of the product is just now being released and it features customization using Flex and Java Script. The image below provides an example of some of the data windows you can open to display your data but it doesn’t do it justice. You need to see the product in action. You can download and evaluation copy. Try it out.
