Wednesday
25Feb2009
New Product Review: Voyager GIS
Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 8:24AM
My friend Brian Goldin and his business partner Ryan McKinley have recently launched an awesome new product called Voyager GIS.
Voyager is a search and indexing package for spatially related data and documents.
Configure Search Locations
Once installed, Voyager will crawl your local system or your network (depending on which level of Voyager you purchase. The local version is free.) and create an index of all the spatially related data and documents that it finds. Voyager will find and index any format that is supported by ESRI including map documents, layer files, geodatabase connections, map services, NGA formats, CAD documents, open source formats, and many more.
OK, so why would you want to crawl and index all your geospatially related data and documents?
A couple of big reasons come immediately to mind. First of all, you can use Voyager as a discovery tool. How many hours have you wasted over the years just trying to find the data or maps that you know you have on your network? I know my personal wasted time is probably best measured in months. With Voyager, you can quickly find what you are looking for by data type, by spatial extent, by keyword, etc. You can also discover how other people in your organization have used and symbolized the data in their own work flows. Once you have found the information you want, simply click the "Open With" button and immediately open the source with your tool of choice, or use the clip it and zip it tool to create a data extract.
The second big reason that you would want to use Voyager GIS,
Audit Spatial Data
particularly if you are a GIS Administrator of any sort, is as a data auditing tool. Use Voyager GIS to find data with missing spatial reference, or with missing metadata. Voyager has an open work flow framework so that you can use Voyager to create your own geoprocessing tasks. You can use Voyager to find duplicate data.
If you are a GIS Analyst or especially if you are a GIS Administrator, you owe it to yourself to learn more about Voyager GIS. It is one of the most innovative and useful tools I have seen come on the market in the past few years from one of the best minds in the industry.
You can visit their web site at http://VoyagerGIS.com Contact email is sales@voyagergis.com
Voyager is a search and indexing package for spatially related data and documents.
Configure Search LocationsOnce installed, Voyager will crawl your local system or your network (depending on which level of Voyager you purchase. The local version is free.) and create an index of all the spatially related data and documents that it finds. Voyager will find and index any format that is supported by ESRI including map documents, layer files, geodatabase connections, map services, NGA formats, CAD documents, open source formats, and many more.
OK, so why would you want to crawl and index all your geospatially related data and documents?
A couple of big reasons come immediately to mind. First of all, you can use Voyager as a discovery tool. How many hours have you wasted over the years just trying to find the data or maps that you know you have on your network? I know my personal wasted time is probably best measured in months. With Voyager, you can quickly find what you are looking for by data type, by spatial extent, by keyword, etc. You can also discover how other people in your organization have used and symbolized the data in their own work flows. Once you have found the information you want, simply click the "Open With" button and immediately open the source with your tool of choice, or use the clip it and zip it tool to create a data extract.
The second big reason that you would want to use Voyager GIS,
Audit Spatial Dataparticularly if you are a GIS Administrator of any sort, is as a data auditing tool. Use Voyager GIS to find data with missing spatial reference, or with missing metadata. Voyager has an open work flow framework so that you can use Voyager to create your own geoprocessing tasks. You can use Voyager to find duplicate data.
If you are a GIS Analyst or especially if you are a GIS Administrator, you owe it to yourself to learn more about Voyager GIS. It is one of the most innovative and useful tools I have seen come on the market in the past few years from one of the best minds in the industry.
You can visit their web site at http://VoyagerGIS.com Contact email is sales@voyagergis.com
Reader Comments (2)
Did you actually install and use it? How'd it work?
Yes, I have it installed on my system. I have been using several of the beta versions for months now. It is very easy to install and works great. The install takes only a few minutes and that initial crawl of my system took a couple of hours. The process to create thumbnail images of the various data sets took much longer, but I just let it run over night occasionally when I am not using my system. Incredibly helpful tool.