Screen Shots
Screen Shots
Manifold
® System can draw spectacular maps from freely available data. The image at left is a detail of a 1:24,000-scale SDTS hypsography file from USGS showing a mountain reservoir. Certain equal topographic lines have been selected in red. Manifold provides sophisticated analysis in addition to map drawing.The screen shots have most toolbars turned off or cropped in the "detail"
shots to maximise screen area displayed for browsing over Internet. Click on
the Thumbnails to see a full sized image, and then click your browser's BACK arrow.
All data is free from the Manifold CD or from our FTP site.
For an overview of the latest Manifold System release see the News page and the Home page. Manifold System provides spectacular integration of images and surfaces, new database capabilities and Manifold IMS (Internet Map Server) integrated into Manifold to allow publication of maps to the web.
Earth from
space shown in Manifold System - Click on the thumbnails for a larger
image. These scenes were created by projecting an image into
Orthographic projection and then layering it in a map with several layers using
alpha masks, invisible pixels, layer transparency to create the "haze"
effect at the edges of the globe. The initial images were
created from GLOBE
terrain elevation data and had been processed with a Relief
algorithm and color changes in ocean areas. One of the images shows a polar aspect orthographic projection,
correctly wrapping an ordinary, cylindrical lat/long image into a polar
view. Cool!
Afghanistan: Superior Spatial Editing and Selection Transfer - Manifold
sSystem can transfer selections from vector drawing
layers in a map to image layers or surface layers and vice versa. This technique allows
"cookie-cutting" of images using drawing areas as a guide. The
thumbnails at left show an image of Afghanistan that has been cookie-cut out of the NASA
"Blue Marble" image of the Earth as seen from space. The
Afghanistan image has been exactly trimmed to the borders of Afghanistan shown
in a countries drawing. One screenshot shows just the Afghanistan image
alone in Latitude / Longitude projection. The other screenshot shows the
Afghanistan image in Orthographic projection (a view as the Earth appears from
space) overlaid upon a background of the original NASA Blue Marble image.
Image effects include use of transparency to de-emphasize the background and
Gaussian Blur to create a drop shadow. Manifold can easily re-project
drawings, images, surfaces or anything else seen in maps. The maps shown
consist of several image, drawing, and label layers.
3D
Terrains Draped with Images and Vector Layers - Surfaces can be seen as 3D
terrains in a 3D window. Other map layers such as drawings and images can
be overlaid on the terrains for fabulous, synthetic views of your data.
The illustration at right shows a region in San Luis Obispo County,
California. A USGS 30 meter DEM (digital elevation data) was imported as a
surface and shown in 3D. A color orthophoto image was then imported and
placed in an image layer in the map. A vector drawing (green) shows a
region designated for open space near the lake.
The illustration at right appears
courtesy of Robert Heitzman. The image at left was prepared by
Manifold expert James Burn and shows the Lemmon Mountain region in Canada near
New York. 
The lower thumbnails at right and descriptions appear courtesy of Paul Pingrey. The upper thumbnail shows a 3D terrain view of Wisconsin's Devil's Lake State Park. The image combines a USGS DEM, colored for height, with a transparent digital orthophoto overlay. See the original website at Digital Grove Mapping, which includes a review of Manifold System.
The lower
thumbnail also shows Wisconsin's Devil's Lake State Park in a view looking east
across the south end of the lake. The south
arm of the moraine that helped create Devil's Lake appears as the green
elevation in the old river channel between the East Bluff on the left and
Devil's Nose on the right. 
The
image at the left was created using expert-level manipulation of Manifold.
The central part of the image is a Manifold-generated terrain view of the
terrain in the area draped with an overhead photograph. The 3D terrain
image is placed on top of an ordinary photograph of the same shoreline shot from
a boat. Because the terrain is shown from a camera viewpoint that is the
same as the location of the boat when the photograph was taken, both the terrain
image and the photograph line up. This illustration shows the uncanny
realism possible through expert usage of Manifold. (Image created by Andrew
Mitchell)
Image Mosaics - Manifold's extraordinary georegistration and image-editing capabilities allow users to snap images from aircraft and then mosaic them together to create georegistered overhead aerial images at a fraction of the cost of traditional procurement. The thumbnail at right shows an image created in Carbon County, Utah. County GIS staffers used a mid-range consumer digital camera and hired a Cessna from the local airport for a few hours to snap a series of overhead photos. After "a lot of pointing and clicking" the images were georegistered and formed into a mosaic covering the region of interest. Total cost was only a few hundred dollars, a tremendous savings over the tens of thousands of dollars such remote sensing image acquisition normally requires. Click on the image at right to see a 2 MB (reduced in size) larger image.
Surfaces
and Vector Layers - Manifold System surfaces can be seen in a variety
of styles, such as shaded relief, 3D visualization, or color-coded elevations
with a click of a button. These two images show the same surface seen in
different ways. They are created from military
VMAP2 (restricted distribution / classified) high resolution data sets overlaid
upon a military DTED Level 2 terrain elevation data set imaged as a grayscale
image in 2D. The thumbnail at right shows hydrography features. The
thumbnail at left (590KB) shows a zoomed in view of the entire Manifold console
showing transportation layers, plus lakes. Area shown is near Belton
Reservoir, Texas, USA. The thumbnail at right shows
a DTED Level 2 surface shaded to provide relief and used with both
roads and hydrography layers.
LandSat
and DEM surface with TIGER/Line vector layers - Contributed by Manifold expert Bob
Heitzman, the map uses TIGER/Line 2000, a composite Landsat image, and DEM.
The composite Landsat image was created by mixing LandSat channels within
Manifold to create a natural color image. It is used at 50% opacity. The
combination of the 50% LandSat image and the DEM works well to add relief. The
dunes are nearly flat in the LandSat image but are clearly shown in terrain
relief as a result of the DEM terrain. The map shows a region of San Luis Obispo county in California.
In addition to being a very cool map, what's especially interesting about this
image is that all of the high quality data sets in it were downloaded for free
from the Internet. If your community seeks to create maps like this, with
Manifold you can do so effectively at very low cost. The Manifold display is in Windows XP.
AVHRR Overview of the United
States in False Color - Manifold System image of June, 1992 composite
scan of US from Pathfinder mission Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR)
sensor. Bands 1,2,3 and 4 used to compose a false color RGB image.
Vector outlines of selected Western states overlaid. Image
shown in Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area projection centered on Latitude 45 N,
Longitude 100 W. Manifold can read AVHRR images directly right off the EROS
Data Center CDs and manipulate the 5 band AVHRR data as desired to form
images. The image linked to the thumbnail has been greatly reduced to save
on web traffic. The original image in R5 is over 4500 x 2800 with each pixel
being 1 km wide.
3D
View of the Grand Canyon - Click on the
thumbnail to see a terrain window, an automatic 3D view of elevation data in
Manifold System. Click
here to see a 780 KB animated gif of the Grand Canyon flooding. This
animated.png was created using a DEM data set of the Grand Canyon imaged in a
terrain window in Manifold as seen in the thumbnail at right. Manifold can
draw a semi-transparent "waterline" plane through a terrain at a given
level for waterline analysis. The flood effect was created by setting the
water level higher in ten even steps and then making an animated.png of the
results using Microsoft.png Animator.
Sophisticated
Image Composition and Layering - Manifold System
allows
very sophisticated composition of images using transparency and layering,
including combinations of image, drawing (vector) and surfaces. The screen
shot at right shows a workspace where an image is composed from five different
layers using Adobe PhotoShop-like effects.
Multiple
simultaneous projections of the same image - A Manifold
System workspace showing Mollweide, Eckert VI and Miller Cylindrical projections of the "globe.bmp"
sample image, overlaid with two drawing layers:
world boundaries and (in two of the maps) US boundaries. Note that
Manifold can mix and match the same drawing and images within different maps at
the same time. Images and drawings will be re-projected "on the
fly" to suit the visualization needs of each map (the original image is
untouched). The desktop also shows that multiple views can be opened into
the same map at the same time with independent pan and zoom.
Transparency
- Manifold System includes three methods for transparency: invisible pixels,
percent transparency by layer and even RGBa images that
allow each individual pixel to have its own percent transparency. Click on the small thumbnail at
right for a 100K image that
shows the use of invisible pixels, a very simple method. We selected oceans in the globe image
used in the example above and then pressed Edit - Delete
to "delete" the pixels. This leaves the regions they occupied
transparent, so that when the image is used in a layer stack in a map items
below it can be seen through the transparent regions. In this case we see
the graticule "below" the floating world land areas. Note how regions of
invisible pixels are
projected just fine into Mollweide projection along with everything else.
Invisible pixels may be combined with RGBa images where
each pixel can have its own percent transparency. The
image at right shows transparent layers. - A partially transparent vector layer showing
urban areas overlaid on an image. Manifold can overlay any mix of image or
vector layers and set any layer to a desired percentage transparency. The
urban areas drawing has been thematically formatted and is seen in a small
window.
Images
combined with transparent vector layers - 730K
screen shot showing images of the San Francisco Bay region combined with vector
layers. A Landsat 7 image (originally shot in
Space Oblique Mercator) is displayed on the fly within an "Overhead" Orthographic projection in
the center map, which also shows US boundaries in a vector layer as well as a
layer of hydrography lines from a Palo Alto 1:100K-scale USGS
series map. Some of the lines in the Palo Alto set have been selected and appear
in red. The large map in background shows a perspective view from space
computed for a point over the Atlantic ocean to show how the Bay Area would
appear to an incoming spacecraft rocketing in over the US. All image
projections are done on the fly. Manifold can simultaneously show the same images and drawings in
different views using different projections, with simultaneous re-projection of
vector and raster data. Note: Many Landsat
images are remarkably close fits when treated as Orthographic or Vertical
Perspective images without any need to track down the orbit or other information
required to fully utilize Space Oblique projection. Manifold can easily
georegister an image with great precision to any desired projection. Download an image off
the Internet and use it right away! Cool!
Contributions from Users
A recent discussion in a forum thread in the Georeference forum for Manifold users has resulted in many beautiful and practical examples of maps created in Manifold. Please visit the forum thread for authors and author's comments on how these extraordinary maps were created.
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Landscape planning for a road surface - Created with Manifold plus a font editor used to create the tops of trees. |
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Landscape planning for a road surface - This image shows a series of maps illustrating the process used to create the above image. |
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Leak Detection for Water System in Sint Maarten - Manifold was used to record GPS locations for relevant facilities and critical information. |
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Bicycle Club Map - Created in Manifold 5.50, using scripting to generate connected line strings and distances. |
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Data Sales - A Manifold 6.00 map created to support data sales, allowing selection of tiles based on addresses, township lots or other variables. |
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Project Management and Billing Support - Used internally to help keep track of projects. |
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BLM Map (front side) - Created by a volunteer using Manifold to produce an updated recreational travel map for a region in Utah. Created in Manifold 6.50 with some editing in Paint Shop Pro. |
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BLM Map (back side) - The rear side of the BLM map. Full resolution TIF images (approximately 86 and 88 megabytes each!) are available for those with fast Internet access: |
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Hurricane Frequency - A frequency analysis of north Atlantic basin hurricanes for the period 1851 to 2005. More intense color shows more frequent hurricanes. |
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Roads - Roads created from ground survey data in Delhi, India using Manifold 5.5. |
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Power Line Profile - Profile for a Power Transmission Line, drawn completely using Manifold 6.5 (not imported from CAD). Manifold was used right from the initial route selection (using 50k topo maps and 6m satellite imagery), processing the survey data and preparing the plan and profiles using scripts. |
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Road Inventory - Very elegant presentation (labels are off) showing assets on a roadway from ground survey data. |
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Seismic Lines - LandSat imagery from GLCF (channels combined with Manifold 6.50), showing a few planned seismic lines cutting across prestine rain forest in Naga Thrust |
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Digitized Topo Map - Digitized using a different GIS package and imported into Manifold. |
New Manifold IMS Sample Sites
These sites show the Manifold Internet Map Server, which is included in Manifold System Release 5.50 Professional Edition. Manifold IMS provides a high performance web mapping solution that's powerful enough for organizations yet affordable by individuals. Manifold IMS works with standard web browsers and requires no plug ins or costly middleware! Manifold IMS automatically creates web sites from Manifold projects using a variety of templates. The example sites show the use of three different templates:
High compatibility template - This template
creates a site that will work with older, "4.x" style browsers from
Microsoft, Netscape, Mozilla and Opera. The sites use more austere style
with text link menus instead of command buttons. Tables created by the Find
tool and queries will pop open in a new browser window. Pan by clicking
near the edges of the map. Two sites show the standard template.
Mexico - A map of Mexico with layers using zoom ranges to control which layers come on upon zoom in. Shows labels as a layer.
Surface with Vector Layers (at right) - Montara Mountain SDTS DEM surface overlayed on a base map of the San Francisco Bay region, with roads and hydrography layers. Zoom in to see the surface. This generates detailed images (due to the surface... same as raster images) that do not compress well and so the image served to your browser may be over 150K in size. If you have a slow Internet link it could take a while for the image to be downloaded. Note how much faster the mexico example is ("sparse" images compress well and so are smaller) even though it too is a large image size.
Standard
template - This template creates attractive sites designed for
newer "5.x" browsers including Microsoft IE, Netscape, Mozilla and
Opera. It provides a point and click Info tool as well as a
prettier, tool-based interface. Pan by selecting the Center tool and then
clicking anywhere near the edge of the map.
Theater - Architectural plans for the TSB Theater in Plymouth, New Zealand taken from
.dxf files. A smaller window, but showing how one can use Manifold IMS to publish CAD drawings.
Standard
template with frames - A very fast and convenient template for newer
"5.x" browsers that reports the results of queries, Find and
the Info button in tables that appear below the main map display.
With or without frames, the standard template is a good choice for high
performance intranet use and internet web sites aimed at more sophisticated
users who want greater interactivity with the data sets.
107th Congressional Districts (at right) - A practical application that shows Congressional districts in the United States for the 107th Congress with many IMS features such as a legend, a query and Info and Find tools. Zoom in to see ever more detailed city names. Click on the Info tool and then click on a district to see the name of the representative and their web site. Try entering Barton in the Find box to see a bizarrely "Gerrymandered" district. The Query pane is set up with a query that will list all representatives in a particular state. Enter the state's two letter postal code and press Query to see the representatives, sorted by last name.
Web Site Programming Examples
Manifold.net provides programming examples for IMS that show how simple programming can be used to create custom sites. See the Free Stuff page for downloadable source code. Examples include:
Webcities
- The site at left provides an example of programmatic use of Manifold IMS to
create web pages. It was created without use of a template by scripting in
Javascript in the .asp files used. Two new toolbar buttons
are added. Click the Zoom to Cities button and then click near a
city dot to get information (lat/lon location) on that city. Click on the Zoom
to Query button and click anywhere in the map to find all cities within the
given distance of the clicked point. A table with hyperlinks to the
city appears for all cities within range.
Locations
- This site demonstrates the use of a linked drawing and database code to create
point objects at user clicked locations. Users can add a point by clicking with
a new locations tool. The code is kept as simple as possible so that it is
clear what is going on. Once the linked drawing grows to 200 locations the
oldest 100 locations are removed. Linked
drawings are drawings that are automatically created from external database
tables, so you can control what appears in the map by simply changing values in
your database management system's tables.
Navigation - Shows the combined use of server-side and client-side code to implement zoom box functionality and custom scaling. Also demonstrates how to switch themes by toggling map layers. Zoom ranges allow new layers (roads, rivers, cities) to come into view when zooming in.
OverviewMap
- Demonstrates how to create and use an overview map for navigation in
the main map. Shows various techniques to re-center and re-scale
the map view. Includes use of user-specified locations using
coordinate conversion on the fly to specify desired views. Also shows
how to organize labels in layers so that more important layers are given
priority.
Geocoding
- Demonstrates how to use the Manifold geocoding engine from IMS. This requires
installation of the Manifold 5.50 Geocoding Data product on the IMS machine as
well as Manifold 5.50. To keep
the example easily downloadable it does not contain complete streets for the US
but rather just pans to show town names. Only the main cities have labels
on them. The example allows entering addresses either as a single, concatenated
line or as separate street address, city, state and zip fields. Entering just a
zip code is a handy way of looking up a zip code.
It has reasonable error return
despite being a tutorial example. For instance, if a visitor enters an address
of "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC" into the single line
address box it will return an alternative match using the correct street name of
"1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW". 
AltFuelStations - A fully-developed website that can be used as a "dealer locator" or other facilities location web site. Demonstrates how to use a query to locate facilities within the desired distance of a user-supplied zip code. It finds alternative fuel stations (liquid natural gas, electricity charge points, etc) within Texas. Try looking up all stations within 5 miles of zip code 75202 and it will show the stations and provide a table list that includes hyperlinks to display a local map (using MapQuest). The web site is easily maintained without stopping the web server because any changes desired can be made to the .mdb file that provides the stations list. The example uses very simple background maps, which of course could be made more elaborate if desired. Other Texas zip codes to try are 77057, 79331, 75013, and 75248.
Click here to visit the Manifold IMS home page and learn more about Manifold IMS requirements and capabilities.
Manifold 3D View Studio and Prior Manifold
Edition Screen Shots
Three views of Afghanistan created in 3D View
Studio. Contributed by Malcolm Edwards, the views are created using
Etopo5 data from NOAA, in combination with DCW population points for the three
major Afghani cities. The vertical scale is exaggerated by
a factor of five. 
Pasteur
Institute Study in St. Petersburg - An amazing series of maps created by
Dmitri Bagh in Manifold 4.50 for the Pasteur Institute showing comparative occurrence of
Leptospirosis in various animal and human populations. The web page shows
use of cartograms, grid analysis and isoline (contour) analysis. The
Thumbnail at left illustrates an isoline analysis of Leptospirosis cases in
dogs.
Himalayan Mountain Region (right) - Huge, full-screen shot of the foothills of
the Himalayan Mountains taken from the Digital Chart of the World
"Asia" thematic layers imaged in Manifold. Over 500 megabytes of
maps are displayed simultaneously in Manifold 4.50 for all of Asia in the incredible detail
visible in this zoomed-in screen shot.
Time
Zone Boundaries and State Borders - Surprisingly, time zone boundaries in
the United States don't always align with state borders. This screen shot
shows an example drawn from a detailed shot from the free, hires US Time Zones
map available from Manifold. It shows the Wisconsin / Michigan border in
the region of the upper Michigan peninsula, where the Central Time Zone extends
well into Michigan. The "raised edge" effect is easy to create
in Manifold. Although Manifold has a vast array of intense computational
capabilities, many people use Manifold just to make clear, simple maps because
it also has first rate graphics art capabilities for formatting, labeling and
other cartographic requirements.
Final Resting Place of the Kursk - A map of part of the North Polar Sea showing seafloor bathymetry in the region where the Russian Federation submarine "Kursk" was tragically lost with all hands. Prepared by Malcolm Edwards, who comments, "My original intention was to locate the resting place of the Kursk. The map made here is the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area polar projection. The color scheme is based on elevation, broken into 22 different classes, (equal interval)." Note: the triangular shape of the map arises from projection into the Lambert Azimuthal projection.
Creating
the Great Lakes - This web site
includes numerous Case Studies
with lots of additional images. This elegant example (illustration left) shows
how we can create the Great Lakes in a continental map that does not show them.
We use information from high resolution maps to create a "cookie
cutting" area that is then used to cut out the shape of the Great Lakes
from a continental map. The example shows simple editing, creation of new
areas and use of the area union and split solvers. Manifold is a terrific
database and analytic GIS, but it also has superior map editing and cartographic
creation capabilities. This example uses the sophisticated, but
easy-to-use spatial topology operations in Manifold to create new map features.
The thumbnail shows a screen shot from the Great
Lakes case study.
3d View
Studio screen shot showing
distribution of gold deposits in Omo Ranch area of California's Sierra Nevada gold
country. The horizontal plane has been "textured" with a map showing
roads, logging trails, rivers, and the locations of registered gold mines taken from the
U.S. Bureau of Mines database. The colorful surface represents an Akima
interpolation of the altitude of gold mine deposits in the region. Where the gold
deposit surface cuts through actual terrain elevation is a good place to start looking for
exposed gold bearing veins. Three particular gold mines have been picked out with
vertical markers. 3d View provides full three dimensional lighting effects including
sophisticated surface materials properties. This scene is illuminated by ambient
light as well as by five additional lights (not shown) placed by the user to better reveal
the complex contours of the gold bearing data surface. 3D View Studio is an
optional add-in to Manifold System.
Radial
Distances from Antenna - A nice, clear map of the airport in Tulsa, Oklahoma
that was taken from a USGS 7.5 minute SDTS file downloaded free from the USGS
web site. The map shows a planned antenna with circles at 500, 1000 and
1500 meter radii from the antenna. The shot also shows simple use of labels for
a legend plus a scale bar. Clear, elegant, and easy to create.
3D View Studio Wireframe - Manifold 3D View Studio provides 3D visualization and analysis. 3D View Studio can display in a seeming infinity of styles. The illustration at right shows a "wireframe" terrain view.
Cathedrals
in the Eclipse - A recent map showing three high Gothic French cathedrals
(Amien, Rouen, and Riems in the path of the 11 August 1999 total solar
eclipse. Background base map is the new Europe collection from Manifold
World Volume 1. The solar eclipse umbral path map data as well as
local astronomical data for numerous cities in Europe in the umbral path are
available for free download in Manifold format from the Manifold FTP
servers. The numbers provide the duration of totality at each cathedral
(Note that Riems will enjoy 19 seconds more totality than Rouen). Manifold
has an amazing ability to import data, using facilities such as the Table View
Calculator to manipulate awkward coordinates using a combination of string and
mathematical functions. Imagine the impact on the medieval mind of a total
solar eclipse!
Clients - Stations Solver, Thematic Mapping:
Drawn on a map of Mexico showing Mexican states as areas. This function is called
"thematic mapping" by many GIS systems, but we call it
"autoformatting". The different areas are automatically colored in six
color levels using the contents of a data field in the database. In a second layer,
the Clients-Stations solver (a customer requested solver available on the Manifold Net FTP site as an example in source
code) is drawn using green triangles for clients and yellow diamonds for stations.
This solver takes a set of Clients, and then assigns each client to the nearest Station by
straight line distance.
3D View
Studio screen shot showing
abstract data surface representing another area of gold deposits. This shot
illustrates different data plotting styles, including "Cone" style vertical
bars. 3d View 2 can plot multiple data sets at the same time. Users can
"spin" or rotate the data set interactively using mouse or keyboard
controls. 3D motion keyboard controls may be set using default key layouts taken
from Quake, Descent, or Microsoft Flight Simulator. 3d View 2 can also generate
.avi
file "fly throughs" using interactive flight recording or scripted flight
motions. 
3D View Studio screen shot showing the populations of US counties as provided by the U.S. Bureau of the census. Blue columns show 1990 population figures. The central green rods that protrude up through most columns show 1990 housing units. Where green rods are visible, there are more housing units than population.
Gold Mines! Autoformatting
Example: A map of gold mines in the California Sierra Nevada foothills
region colored by elevation in 500 foot increments from Red to Purple. The San
Francisco Bay is at left with the California / Nevada border at right. Click
on the thumbnail to see a full screen 1024 x 768 screen shot (Release 4.00
toolbars illustrated) in only 29K.
Gold Discovery
in California: Gold was discovered in California at Sutter's Mill ("+"
marks the spot!) on the South Fork of the American River. Manifold analytics have
been used to ascertain relative relationships between gold deposits (yellow) running
through the hills over the river near the discovery site. The larger nuggets found
in the mill race probably descended from these deposits, which have been extensively
explored in the 150 years since the discovery.
Multiple
Map Use: This map example overlays six maps using 18 layers: A USGS
1:2,000,000-scale basemap, the USGS "Placerville" 1:100K-scale more detailed
map, a set of names from the US Global Names Information System for California, an
extraction of gold mines between 100 and 4000 feet elevation from the US Bureau of Mines
database, a place names database of towns, and a custom grid showing the locations of USGS
7.5 minute printed topographic maps. A simple formatting style reveals the
relationships between mines, access roads and very small streams in the context of larger
roads and major watercourses. All these maps are free for download from USGS and
Manifold.
Zoom Into Sly Park Topo Map:
(left) A zoom into the above example, just below the middle of the Sly Park 7.5
Minute "tile". Individual names for gold mines have been turned on, as
well as their elevations in feet. Labels have been slightly repositioned by hand
(drag and drop!) for a more pleasing effect than achieved by default formatting.
Thumbnail on right shows buffer zone areas formatted in different
colors. Manifold can apply thousands of different formats in a single map.
3D
Views: Using the Manifold 3D View Studio visualization system, the screen shot at left
shows a Z surface interpolated from the Elevation values of the mines in the Sly Park Topo
Map examples above. See the Solver
Packages page for more screen shots of this infinitely cool new product for
Manifold users. Manifold's 3D View Studio solver package is an extra cost item.
3D View of Complex Map Data: OK, here is another
view of the 3D View Studio system. We've popped open a 3D View of gold mine
data that is overlaid on the Omo Ranch USGS map area. The
view has been rotated so that the green arrow points North (map visible in
background is North up), allowing a view down the Cosumnes River Middle Fork valley,
clearly visible as a deep valley to the lower left of the 3D View surface. The Map
View in background shows the Cosumnes river as a thicker blue line, with local paved roads
in green and unpaved trails in grey. Note that the interpolated surface presented in
3D View is taken from mine elevation data, and is not the same as the topographic
surface. It is a much more interesting surface for prospectors.
TIGER/Line
1997 CD Coverages - Created for our TIGER/Line 1997 page, this map shows
which TIGER/Line CDs cover which parts of the US. "Exploded Map"
cartography is easy with Manifold, because the system can easily drag selected
items to a new location. Select the states to be moved and then drag them
outward slightly.
Map View Detail:
CIESIN block-level Census demographics for Santa Clara County, zoomed into Palo Alto.
Population densities within blocks plotted exponentially using autoformatting in four
intervals (0-3, 4-26, 27-151, and 152-4398 residents per block). Since "green"
often means less population, we've used light yellow dots for max density and dark green
for least density. USGS Palo Alto Quad map used as background with autoformatting of Roads
layer by road type and hydrography in blue. Labels drawn using ScalaSans Caps font,
a FontShop font. Yellow diamond marks the Menlo Park USGS regional HQ. Detail shows
part of Annotations toolbar and part of main toolbars at upper edge of Map View.
Map
View: click the thumbnail for a full size 800 x 600 view of the above example.
Illustration shows default Release 3.00 toolbars loaded across the top of the display and
solver output controls on the left margin. Layer tabs are at the bottom of the
display, with SQL toolbar and Selection positioning (Center selection, Animate, Instant
Form View, etc) controls at the very bottom. Map shows CIESIN-provided extractions
of block level Census data overlaid on 1:100K-scale USGS map of Palo Alto quad. Two
"spot" labels show the locations of Fuki Sushi on El Camino Real and of Miyaki
Sushi (hot!) on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Spots are "persistant"
labels which are always on screen and always have a line running towards the marked
spot. Clicking on the label teleports you back to the spot.
Results History Detail:
Results History window popped open over previous example. We've selected Census city
blocks within 1/2 mile of an urgent care medical facility in downtown Palo Alto (bright
yellow highlighting) and fed them to the One Way Frequency statistics solver. We told the
solver to tally how the population data are distributed within 10 equal
intervals. This entire operation is done with mouse clicks and takes about 10
seconds.
An Eighth Grade Map - Contributed by our
graphics art vendors in Palo Alto, this map was created to illustrate an eighth-grade
science project. The project involved collection of water samples from San Francisco bay
at the marked locations and a subsequent hunt by microscope for copepods (a type of
zooplankton that have been determined to harbor cholera bacteria in the Chesapeake Bay and
elsewhere). The map is a simple, elegant map created from USGS 1:100K scale maps,
the US hires shorelines map, a major roads layer from the California USGS 1:2mil map and
an Access database containing the copepod sampling sites.
1:24,000-Scale SDTS Map Detail: Small section
of Palo Alto SDTS map (1:24,000-scale) from USGS FTP server, with man-made objects,
hydrography, hypsography and boundaries layers (transportation layers suppressed for
clarity). Highlighted in red is the Stanford Linear Accelerator, approximately 2
miles long. Small polygons at the bottom and left of the field are individual
houses. See illustration below.
Zoomed In 1:24,000-Scale SDTS Map Detail: Section of
the the map above from near the bottom, about one fourth from the right edge showing SDTS
detail at higher zoom level, but still not the highest zoom level. Polygons are
indivdual shapes of individual houses in the Palo Alto / Los Altos hills above the
accelerator and the Stanford Dish radio telescope. Hypsography lines reveal why the press
has covered so many mudslides and moving houses during recent rain in Northern California.
Manifold can easily handle vast amounts of data, including data with widely differing coordinate rectangles. The screen shot below shows the 55 Megabyte US National Highway Network with the Interstate Highway subnetwork highlighted in blue. The maps are in simple LatLon projection.
Base
maps are three separate maps: US boundaries as areas map, Canadian boundaries as areas,
and Mexican states as areas with boundary lines. The black square in the Northwest US are four
USGS 1:100,000-scale high resolution maps loaded simultaneously. That's almost 100
Megabytes of map data loaded simultaneously. They appear black when the display
is zoomed out to encompass the entire US because of the high density of objects in 1:100K
USGS maps. Finally, the yellow circles show border crossings between the US, Canada, and
Mexico. Also loaded but not displayed is the US Zip Code centroid data set. All data sets
are from the Manifold System CD.
The next sample is a zoomed in view of the upper Northwest US, showing the four 1:100,000-scale USGS maps in the Seattle area. We've restacked the layers using layer tabs at the bottom of the screen and have done some additional formatting.
Next we zoom in even closer. This illustration is zoomed into the area near the ferry terminal in downtown Seattle. We've also added the US zip code centroid data set.
Note that the US States as areas data set is wonderfully detailed: even when used as a base area layer under a USGS 100K scale map the correlation is quite good. The Seattle ferry terminal is at the upper edge of the screen. Green dots and black numbers denote Zip Code centroids. Keep in mind that even as we are working at this zoom level, we still have over 100 megabytes of data loaded and available for use as illustrated in the first screen shot. Now, we'll turn on the SQL tool bar and find a zip code.
The SQL toolbar automatically loads up available fields for whatever layer is active.
Pick a field from the pulldown field box, pick an SQL operator from the middle box, and
enter a value in the right hand box. Push Select and the SQL solver finds your
object and displays it as you wish. When many objects are involved, Manifold can animate
the selected set for you by flashing the selected points, lines or areas to make them
stand out in complex displays. Selections can be combined with other selections or layers
using Boolean logic, may be saved to new or existing layers, saved to a new map, or even
fields within selected objects can be changed automatically to given values. 
Image Detail (right): World terrain elevations as raster image, georeferenced into Robinson projection using Release 5.00 tools. Contrast has been improved and 3D relief highlights added. Click on the picture to see the full image.
VISUAL DATABASE / CAD MAPPING
Manifold opens the gateway to a new way of working with databases... visual selection and manipulation of data. Manifold can organize any set of objects and data relationships by their visual or spatial relationships. Let's take an example in screen shots.
The thumbnail at right expands to
show a PC motherboard drawn in Manifold. Each object was "loaded" with
data typical of that which is tracked for components by modern motherboard manufacturers:
component name, class, vendor, salesman, cost, operating temperature range, power
required, voltage, and so on. Once all this data is in Manifold, it's really easy
to work with the database using visual techniques.
Suppose we need to cost reduce the board, and want to check out which components cost more and which cost less. We've autoformatted the IC layer so that red is the most expensive, blue is medium, and green items cost less. Intermediate shades will represent intermediate costs. We can immediately see where our money is going.
Once our data is accessible visually, we can
ask all sorts of questions which are instantaneously answerable in
Manifold but which are a really pre-Cambrian sort of primitive hassle to answer using
traditional database techniqes. Suppose we want to take a look within the database
at certain key components which a first glance has identified as important. We'd
like to know who sells them to us, and how much we pay. In Manifold we just click on
the components to Select them. No problem! The thumbnail
shows the components we clicked on, with the name labels turned on and a more traditional
CAD formatting being used. The IC's selected are in red grid.
Click on Table View and we get a
database table presentation of the data (table view clipping from the motherboard database
shown). Sort the table by Name, Vendor, or other heading just by clicking on the
heading. To pry this data out of traditional sorts of data interfaces, we have to check
which component is where on the motherboard, tediously look it up by querying the part
number, and then fetching the data we need. With Manifold, it's a lot easier to let
the visual object itself be the organizing metaphor. If you're interested in data
for objects in a diagram, why not just click on them? Detail:
motherboard database Table View for chips selected in the above thumbnail. This is a
made-up example. Andy doesn't sell AMD (of course!), it's been a long while since
Ron has sold memory and Richard hammers out a lot hotter software than BIOS roms...
Suppose we want to run some statistics? Say, total cost of the items selected, their average power consumption, or other statistical measures? No problem. Click on the appropriate solver and see the answer immediately in Results History. Detail: Click on the "Field Sum" solver to add up the Costs of the components selected. Hey! that's way too expensive. Let's go back to "A. Grove" and get a better price on that K5. Maybe Wyle will give us a better price on the VX PCI set as well...
Other Ideas for Visual Database / CAD Mapping: Any time where your data items are located ties into how you'd like to see your data, think of Manifold: Layout of products within supermarkets, organization of stores. Warehouse utilization patterns. Factory layout. Documentation lookup in complex plant projects... there's no end of examples where the best way to organize data is by how you see it and how it is laid out in real life.
A Performance Note - Manifold was designed to image the paved road system of the entire world, or over 500 Megabytes. Most people's factories don't have 500MB of data, let alone an individual store or warehouse. The system is rocket hot on databases of only a few tens of megabytes.
Seriously, isn't this a
bargain? - Now's the time to put to work the spectacular, synergistic benefits of
a whole lot of desktop technologies maturing at once. Desktops now outperform the
supercomputers of earlier days, Windows software provides the highest leverage development
tools, and Internet makes it possible for us to sell to you by providing more data and
faster product delivery than ever before. Tired of waiting for your GIS vendor to
wake up from a Rip Van Winkle sleep? Buy a copy of Manifold System and see how much
power, performance, reliability and value modern technology delivers today. Visit the Manifold.net Online Store
for a quick, easy, and secure purchase of Manifold products, or (in the US) call 800-556-5919
to order by telephone (9-5 PST).
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