Blue Marble Geographics

Last updated
Blue Marble Geographics
Company type Private
Industry GIS software
Founded Maine (1993)
Headquarters Hallowell, Maine, U.S.
Key people
Patrick Cunningham (President)
ProductsGeographic Calculator, Global Mapper
Website bluemarblegeo.com

Blue Marble Geographics is a developer and provider of geographic information system software products focused on data translation. [1] They provide software products and services for working with GIS data in different formats.

Contents

Blue Marble is a member of the Open Geospatial Consortium.

Products

Geographic Calculator

Blue Marble's first software product, the Geographic Calculator, [2] was developed in 1992 and released in 1993. The Geographic Calculator is a coordinate conversion library with a database of coordinate mathematical objects including projections, coordinate systems, datums, ellipsoids, linear and angular units. The tool is primarily used to translate map coordinates from one system to another. In 2004, the underlying GeoCalc library was re-written and in 2007 a new version was released as the Blue Marble Desktop.

2013 saw a rebranding of the Blue Marble Desktop back to the Geographic Calculator. [3] Blue Marble incorporated all of the functionality of the Blue Marble Desktop including the Geographic Transformer, Translator and Spatial Connect products into the new Geographic Calculator. This did away with the confusing versioning and introduced an easier-to-follow annual naming convention with one or two service pack updates between releases.

Global Mapper

Global Mapper is a geographic information system software package currently developed by Blue Marble Geographics that runs on Microsoft Windows. Global Mapper handles both vector, raster, and elevation data, and provides viewing, conversion, and other general GIS features.

In 1995 the USGS was in need of a Windows viewer for their data products, so they developed the dlgv32 application for viewing their DLG (Digital Line Graph) vector data products. Between 1995 and 1998 the dlgv32 application was expanded to include support for viewing other USGS data products, including DRG (topographic maps) and DEM (digital elevation model) and SDTS-DLG and SDTS-DEM data products. [4] The development process is described in detail in the USGS paper titled 'A Programming Exercise'.

In 1998 the USGS released the source code for dlgv32 v3.7 to the public domain. [ citation needed ]

In 2001, the source code for dlgv32 was further developed by a private individual into the commercial product dlgv32 Pro v4.0 and offered for sale via the internet. Later that same year the product was renamed to Global Mapper and become a commercial product of the company Global Mapper Software LLC. The USGS was distributing a version of the software under the name dlgv32 Pro (Global Mapper).[ citation needed ]

Blue Marble acquired Global Mapper, LLC at the end of 2011. [5] Mike Childs, the original developer of Global Mapper, continues to work for Blue Marble as a lead developer.

In 2013, Blue Marble released a major version update to Global Mapper that also introduced the new Global Mapper LiDAR Module. [6] The Global Mapper LiDAR Module offers optional enhancement to base Global Mapper application and provides numerous advanced LiDAR processing tools (e.g., automatic point cloud classification, automatic extraction of buildings, trees, and powerlines, cross-sectional viewing and point editing, custom digitizing or extraction of 3D line and area features, etc.).

Company history

Blue Marble Geographics was established in 1993 and was originally located in Gardiner, Maine. [7] The company founder, Jeffrey Bennett Cole, retired in 2003 and Patrick Cunningham took over as President, adding employees and re-focusing the product offering over the next few years. In 2008, they received the Governor’s Award for technology company of the year at the TechMaine technology awards showcase. [8] Blue Marble is one of a handful of geospatial or GIS software companies to come out of Maine in the nineties. The company's founder studied at the University of Maine and like other well known GIS companies from Maine, its roots are tied to the surveying and forestry programs of the University of Maine. After years of growing, the company has moved its home office to Hallowell, Maine. [9]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Esri</span> Geospatial software & SaaS company

Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., doing business as Esri, is an American multinational geographic information system (GIS) software company headquartered in Redlands, California. It is best known for its ArcGIS products. With a 40% market share, Esri is the world's leading supplier of GIS software, web GIS and geodatabase management applications.

A GIS file format is a standard for encoding geographical information into a computer file, as a specialized type of file format for use in geographic information systems (GIS) and other geospatial applications. Since the 1970s, dozens of formats have been created based on various data models for various purposes. They have been created by government mapping agencies, GIS software vendors, standards bodies such as the Open Geospatial Consortium, informal user communities, and even individual developers.

A GIS software program is a computer program to support the use of a geographic information system, providing the ability to create, store, manage, query, analyze, and visualize geographic data, that is, data representing phenomena for which location is important. The GIS software industry encompasses a broad range of commercial and open-source products that provide some or all of these capabilities within various information technology architectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Virtual globe</span> 3D software model or representation of Earth or another world

A virtual globe is a three-dimensional (3D) software model or representation of Earth or another world. A virtual globe provides the user with the ability to freely move around in the virtual environment by changing the viewing angle and position. Compared to a conventional globe, virtual globes have the additional capability of representing many different views of the surface of Earth. These views may be of geographical features, man-made features such as roads and buildings, or abstract representations of demographic quantities such as population.

A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. These images are typically produced by a map server from data provided by a GIS database.

ArcSDE is a server-software sub-system that aims to enable the usage of Relational Database Management Systems for spatial data. The spatial data may then be used as part of a geodatabase.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ArcGIS</span> Geographic information system maintained by Esri

ArcGIS is a family of client, server and online geographic information system (GIS) software developed and maintained by Esri.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">QGIS</span> Open-source desktop GIS software

QGIS, also known as Quantum GIS, is a geographic information system (GIS) software that is free and open-source. QGIS supports Windows, macOS, and Linux. It supports viewing, editing, printing, and analysis of geospatial data.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February 2006 to provide financial, organizational and legal support to the broader Free and open-source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GDAL</span> Translator library for raster and vector geospatial data formats

The Geospatial Data Abstraction Library (GDAL) is a computer software library for reading and writing raster and vector geospatial data formats, and is released under the permissive X/MIT style free software license by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. As a library, it presents a single abstract data model to the calling application for all supported formats. It may also be built with a variety of useful command line interface utilities for data translation and processing. Projections and transformations are supported by the PROJ library.

In cartography and geographic information systems, rubbersheeting is a form of coordinate transformation that warps a vector dataset to match a known geographic space. This is most commonly needed when a dataset has systematic positional error, such as one digitized from a historical map of low accuracy. The mathematics and procedure are very similar to the georeferencing of raster images, and this term is occasionally used for that process as well, but image georegistration is an unambiguous term for the raster process.

Geospatial metadata is a type of metadata applicable to geographic data and information. Such objects may be stored in a geographic information system (GIS) or may simply be documents, data-sets, images or other objects, services, or related items that exist in some other native environment but whose features may be appropriate to describe in a (geographic) metadata catalog.

Cadcorp Limited is a British owned and run company established in 1991. Cadcorp has its headquarters in Stevenage, Hertfordshire, U.K. Cadcorp has a network of distributors and value added resellers (VARs) around the world.

Hexagon Geospatial's GeoMedia Professional is a geographic information system (GIS) management solution for map generation and the analysis of geographic information with smart tools that capture and edit spatial data. GeoMedia is used for: creating geographic data; managing geospatial databases; joining business data, location intelligence and geographic data together; creating hard and soft-copy maps; conduct analysis in 'real-time'; base platform for multiple applications, geographic data validation, publishing geospatial information and analyzing mapped information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital line graph</span>

A Digital Line Graph (DLG) is a cartographic map feature represented in digital vector form that is distributed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). DLGs are collected from USGS maps and are distributed in large, intermediate and small scale with up to nine different categories of features, depending on the scale. They come in optional and Spatial Data Transfer Standard (SDTS) format and are topologically structured for use in mapping and geographic information system (GIS) applications.

Global Mapper is a geographic information system (GIS) software package currently developed by Blue Marble Geographics that runs on Microsoft Windows. The GIS software competes with ESRI, GeoMedia, Manifold System, and MapInfo GIS products. Global Mapper handles both vector, raster, and elevation data, and provides viewing, conversion, and other general GIS features. Global Mapper has an active user community with a mailing list and online forums.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools</span>

Whitebox Geospatial Analysis Tools (GAT) is an open-source and cross-platform Geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing software package that is distributed under the GNU General Public License. It has been developed by the members of the University of Guelph Centre for Hydrogeomatics and is intended for geospatial analysis and data visualization in research and education settings. The Whitebox GAT project started as a replacement for the Terrain Analysis System (TAS), a geospatial analysis software package written by John Lindsay. The current release supports raster and vector (shapefile) data structures. There is also extensive functionality for processing laser scanner (LiDAR) data containing LAS files.

Geographic information systems (GIS) play a constantly evolving role in geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) and United States national security. These technologies allow a user to efficiently manage, analyze, and produce geospatial data, to combine GEOINT with other forms of intelligence collection, and to perform highly developed analysis and visual production of geospatial data. Therefore, GIS produces up-to-date and more reliable GEOINT to reduce uncertainty for a decisionmaker. Since GIS programs are Web-enabled, a user can constantly work with a decision maker to solve their GEOINT and national security related problems from anywhere in the world. There are many types of GIS software used in GEOINT and national security, such as Google Earth, ERDAS IMAGINE, GeoNetwork opensource, and Esri ArcGIS.

SuperMap is a Geographic Information System (GIS) software products and services provider and IT enterprise in Asia. The headquarters are in Beijing, China. The company was founded in 1997. It has over 20 branch offices in China and one office in Tokyo, Japan. SuperMap has developed many agencies and partners all over the world including South Korea and Malaysia. In 2009, SuperMap was listed in Shenzhen Stock Exchange of China (300036.SZ). In 2018 revenues were about $200 million. In 2015, SuperMap occupied 31.6% of Chinese GIS market share, listed as number 1 of Chinese market share. According to the Geographic Information Systems Market Research Study Report 2019 released by ARC Advisory Group, SuperMap has the 3rd largest share in global GIS market, and the 1st largest share in Asia GIS market.

DAT/EM Systems International is an Alaska-based company that develops digital photogrammetric mapping applications to extract and edit 3D vector terrain and object features from stereo imagery and point clouds. DAT/EM Systems International develops solutions for the photogrammetry, engineering & GIS industries.

References

  1. ↑ "GeoTech Today Interview – Patrick Cunningham, President Blue Marble Geographics". www.gisuser.com/. January 24, 2018. Archived from the original on February 21, 2018. Retrieved 2018-02-20.
  2. ↑ the Geographic Calculator
  3. ↑ Blue Marble Software Rebranding
  4. ↑ "U.S. Geological Survey - Spatial Data Transfer Standard". mcmcweb.er.usgs.gov. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
  5. ↑ Deveaux (2011-07-30). "BLUE MARBLE GEOGRAPHICS | Leaders LLC". www.leaders-llc.com. Leaders LLC. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
  6. ↑ Gakstatter (2013-09-23). "Global Mapper V15 Released with Extension Interface and Powerful New LiDAR Tools : Geospatial Solutions". geospatial-solutions.com. geospatial-solutions. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
  7. ↑ "BBB Business Review for Blue Marble Geographics". BBB serving Eastern Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont. Retrieved 2016-03-04.
  8. ↑ "Blue Marble Geographics Receives Top Honors at TechMaine Awards Gala". Archived from the original on September 17, 2011. Retrieved 2008-06-23.
  9. ↑ "Blue Marble Geographics buys larger Hallowell building to support GIS tool sales growth". Mainebiz. Retrieved 2016-03-04.

44°17′37.36″N69°48′14.54″W / 44.2937111°N 69.8040389°W / 44.2937111; -69.8040389

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.