17 March 1999 – Carson City: Manifold Net has commenced shipments of Manifold System Release 4.50, a milestone in GIS technology that delivers complete authoring capability for Microsoft's MapPoint 2000 map display software. The package delivers hundreds of advanced, professional GIS features for use by MapPoint content authors, including interchange with a host of GIS formats, sophisticated spatial analysis, statistical analysis, and point-in-polygon and field inheritance operations that enable packaging of sophisticated GIS results into MapPoint "push pin" data sets and geographic contexts.

A Publish to MapPoint wizard makes it easy for content authors to publish their data into any MapPoint geographic context. Over 3,800 additional fields of demographic data are provided on the Manifold CD to supplement the demographic items distributed with MapPoint.

"MapPoint is a terrific map and data display program that will be widely deployed within Microsoft installations," said Dimitri Rotow, Product Manager, "It is visually elegant and easy to use; however, it has virtually no analytic capability and essentially zero support for content authoring. Our product provides both access to existing content as well as authoring capability for new content. If MapPoint is the television set, Manifold is the TV production studio and the film library. If you intend to publish serious data for MapPoint, you need Manifold."

Point-and-click Publishing - Manifold's Publish for MapPoint 2000 wizard converts the complex keying of data to geographic entities into a point-and-click operation. All possible choices are presented in pull-down menus in combo boxes. Source data from Manifold can be any map, all layers, any particular layer, or the Selection.

Automatic Entity Association - Manifold understands pre-built MapPoint 2000 geographic entities. Automatically publish for Census Tracts, Countries, Counties, by Latitude/Longitude, Metropolitan Area, State/Province, ZIP® Code or other association.

Flexible Key Fields - Publish to MapPoint entities using any choice of key fields. Manifold will automatically load a key field selection menu with fields that may be used as key fields.

Duplicate Item Detection - Automatically check for duplicate data items when publishing.

Easy Data Field Selection - Manifold presents a list of data fields in the data that may be published. Simply check or uncheck a box in front of each data field to include it or exclude it from the published data set.

Automatic Publication in MapPoint 2000 Format - Manifold uses the same Microsoft .mdb database format used by MapPoint 2000, so it's a snap for Manifold to write the newly-published data directly into a MapPoint data file and table. Manifold was written exclusively for Windows.

Demographic "Clip Art" for MapPoint - The Manifold CD includes over 3800 data fields of demographic data that provide content authors with the widest selection of geographic demographic data ever assembled on a single CD. 3,475 fields of data are included for each US County! MapPoint 2000 includes only a few dozen demographic data fields and does not include many important demographic statistics such as crime statistics, health information, social insurance, welfare, oil, gas, and energy statistics. Manifold includes all these data items and many, many more. Manifold world data also includes numerous data items not provided with MapPoint. It's like having the ultimate statistics "clip art" library on a single CD.

Data Extraction from Internet Sources - Tens of thousands of Internet sites around the world publish terabytes of free GIS data in formats that are not readable by MapPoint. Manifold Release 4.50 can read data from all popular government and key private GIS industry formats. Manifold can read government DLG, SDTS, VPF, DEM and gtopo30 DEM, TIGER/Line 1995, and TIGER/Line 1997 formats. Industry formats include ESRI® .SHP, simple .e00, AutoCAD® DXF, and MapInfo® MID/MIF formats. MapPoint content authors can use Manifold to extract data from Internet data sources and to then publish it for use within MapPoint.

Transformation / Interpolation to Fit MapPoint Geographic Contexts - Government or Internet data is often published for geographic contexts that are different than those supported in MapPoint. Manifold's point-in-polygon spatial overlay functions plus various Manifold interpolation functions allow transformation of the source data into a geographic "shape" suitable for use with Microsoft contexts. Manifold data manipulation capabilities enable transformation of data from Internet or UNIX formats or from variable latitude/longitude sources into MapPoint formats. Finally, Manifold can "unproject" data that is often published as projected map data so that it can be used within MapPoint.

More Uses for MapPoint Data - Manifold can use MapPoint data within Manifold functions as well. This enables MapPoint users to exploit the infinite capabilities of Manifold for day-to-day use as well as for authoring. For example, Manifold includes the ability to send email to geo-targeted customer records. This capability is provided as both a scripting example using Microsoft Outlook as well as a new point-and-click solver.

Manifold is a sophisticated GIS package for professional use. It allows users to work with an unlimited number of maps in an unlimited number of layers that may contain an unlimited number of objects in an unlimited number of formats. Unlike "lobotomized" viewers or entry level GIS packages, Manifold includes hundreds of networking, geometric, statistical, database, spatial, and topological capabilities normally found in GIS packages that cost thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars. The package includes numerous converters as well as full development capability using Microsoft Active X, Visual Basic Scripting or Javascript plus Spatial SQL, all at no additional cost. Sources of maps (in addition to the 30,000 megabytes of free maps and data provided at no charge on the Manifold FTP servers) are virtually any map or any database. Manifold works with Access databases directly and can import or merge data from any ODBC data source.

Manifold includes numerous features for developing new maps in dozens of sophisticated projections. The system includes database, graphing and other facilities that allow a free-form approach to selecting data, visualizing it as a map, as database tables, or as the plotted results of various solver operations. The presence of all these capabilities in a single, inexpensive package makes Manifold a "one stop shop" for getting the most out of MapPoint 2000.