Manifold System Release 6.50 Professional Edition

Manifold System Release 6.50 Professional Edition is the most comprehensive, the most powerful and the easiest to use GIS and mapping system ever created.  Nothing else, at any price, even comes close. 

Release 6.50 Professional includes a fabulous array of features while being easier to use and providing rock-solid reliability.  The new 6.50 release delivers 630 upgrades to the previous release and incorporates over 3500 suggestions made by Manifold users and GIS dealers through the world.   The program includes over a million and a half lines of code and has been thoroughly debugged in the hands of thousands of users in over 80 countries during an extensive 6.50 release campaign.  

Whether you are new to GIS or an expert with many years' experience, you'll be glad you found Manifold:

"This product is AWESOME. Not only does the price blow everything else away but it's capabilities are seemingly endless.

New! Georeference Forum Moves to Manifold Site 

The top Internet forum for the Manifold online community, Georeference,  has moved in-house to manifold.net servers and will be maintained by manifold.net staff!  Visit the forum website for access to the new Georeference forum. During migration from the previous site, the forum at first will feature a streamlined, simplified user interface similar to those used for community sites such as craigslist or commercial sites like Google; however, all content, postings, threads, logins and passwords from the previous site have been maintained for the convenience of users even though the look and feel of the forum is initially different.  The forum will be augmented in the days and weeks ahead to serve the Manifold user community.  

Highlights  -  $245 includes all of the following:

One program for all of your GIS needs -  Manifold System 6.50  is an integrated system that simultaneously works with vector drawings, satellite and aerial photos, other raster images, raster data, multichannel remote sensing images, 2D and 3D surfaces and terrain simulations, multilayered maps, user supplied or automatically generated labels and a vast range of database table formats.  Manifold does it all in one seamlessly integrated, high performance package.  Manifold 6.50 even includes a sophisticated, fast, powerful Internet map server that's built right into Manifold so you can publish your maps to the web for browsing by anyone.

Superior Microsoft Windows Compatibility - Designed for Windows XP Today !  - Manifold System Release 6.50 runs in Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT4.0, Windows ME, and Windows 98 and 98SE.  Manifold System Release 6.50 is the only professional GIS program that has achieved Microsoft's coveted "Designed for Windows XP" compatibility status with Windows XP. The manifold.net team works exclusively in Microsoft Windows operating systems, and Manifold System Release 6.50 Professional is the ninth major application created by manifold.net in a series of award-winning Windows applications.  Manifold is by far the "most Windows" GIS of any.  6.50 makes extensive use of Microsoft's own code to guarantee perfect compatibility with Microsoft standards such as ActiveX, OLE DB and ODBC, Microsoft Internet Information Server, COM, Visual Basic scripting, Microsoft Jscript (Javascript),  Microsoft XML and many others. Manifold's Internet Map Server automatically provides templates for both ASP and ASP.NET. The latest Manifold 6.50 release uses Microsoft .NET Framework 1.10 for maximum compatibility with the latest Microsoft technologies.  If you know Windows, you will immediately recognize and feel familiar with Manifold's extensive use of standard Microsoft dialogs for common user tasks such as opening and saving files, choosing colors and other routine dialogs.  Some other GIS packages use proprietary languages for scripting - Manifold uses standard Microsoft languages built in.  

"Great Program! I am somewhat new to GIS programs, but having to use ArcView occasionally ( which is a pain in the neck, as far as I am concerned), I really appreciate the ease of use of Manifold." - User Comment

Import and use maps and data from over 80 different formats - Manifold System can read data from over 80 different vector, raster, terrain elevation and database formats including specialty formats such as grids and the very latest government formats such as HDF EOS used with ASTER Earth observation satellite data. Manifold reads all GIS industry standard formats, including government formats in which millions of free maps and databases are published for free download via Internet.  Read .shp, .mid/.mif, .e00, SDTS, TIGER/Line (through 2002), DLG, VMAP/VPF, NTF, TAB, DXF, TAIF, DGN, DEM, SDTS DEM, NITF, Space Shuttle SRTM  and dozens of other formats. This allows users to access terabytes of free GIS data by Internet directly from the source, and to use data from every GIS system known as well as from numerous specialty software packages.  Manifold System 6.50 exports to .shp, .mid/.mif, .dxf, mfd/mdb, SDTS and .e00 (Enterprise Edition required for .e00 export);  image formats such as .bmp, .ecw, JPEG 2000, .png, .gif, .jpg, .tga, .emf, .tif  and GeoTiff; .bil surface format; database table formats such as Access .mdb, Excel .xls, Paradox .db, Dbase .dbf, Lotus Wkx, HTML and ASCII text .csv formats as well as to any OLE DB or ODBC database or to database providers such as Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 or MySQL if installed.

Thumbnail (above left): 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.  6.50 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.

Detail (above right): The incredible detail of the VMAP 0, in VPF format, downloaded for free from the NIMA web site.  Islets off the coast of Finland.

Create and edit sophisticated maps - Manifold can create new maps from the ground up or edit any map, drawing, image, surface or data set imported into it.  Want a map of counties that shows your county and a few surrounding counties?  No problem! Open a regional map of counties and choose only the ones you want.  Manifold has extremely powerful, CAD-like editing capabilities for creating and editing detailed drawings.  Unlike an ordinary CAD editor like AutoCAD, Manifold always maintains correct geographic context plus a link to database information for objects in the drawing.

(Detail above  left): The hatched region shows a single Congressional district in Texas.  It has been shaped to include voter populations favorable to the incumbent, a practice known as "Gerrymandering." Pink districts are Democrat and Blue districts are Republican.  The screen shot is from a Manifold map server web site.

Fabulous Thematic Formatting - Manifold includes sophisticated, yet easy to use, formatting effects that allow fine control of the appearance of your map.  Automatically color, resize or restyle points, lines and areas using their data values for outstanding and immediately comprehensible thematic formatting effects.  For example vary the size of icons of cities by their population, or change their color or the point symbol used or all three effects at once.  Manifold includes the ability to use "asymmetric" line styles like arrows pointing in the direction of the line or lines that have symbols on one side of the line.   Points may be customized to use symbols from any True Type font or from any graphics file. 

Details (at right): Manifold can use a wide arrange of symbols, colors and styles to show the same information in different ways for maximum comprehension. Just point and click to change formatting.  It's fast, easy and totally addictive! 

"The Tools-Save to component options enable me to import the files into my image editor and then into my desktop publishing software.  I have been able to produce the kind of output I desire.  This is pretty amazing, considering I had no experience with GIS about six weeks ago." - User comment.

Superior image capabilities - Manifold has by far the best image commands and features of any general purpose GIS package.  One can spend tens of thousands of dollars for ESRI's ArcGIS 8 and get far fewer image capabilities than are in Manifold for only $245!  Manifold 6.50's image capabilities are so powerful and so extensive they are rivaled only by professional quality remote sensing / image processors and by professional quality graphics arts programs like Adobe PhotoShop.  Like PhotoShop, Manifold 6.50 provides a vast range of image commands and can work in RGBa images for per-pixel, Alpha channel transparency.  Manifold even goes beyond PhotoShop because unlike PhotoShop Manifold can also edit vector drawings and surfaces and combine image and vector layers with per-layer transparency for all layers.  Images may be imported, georegistered, reprojected to any projection and then exported into common interchange formats like GeoTIFF. 

Illustration (above left): Editing an image using alpha transparency to feather the transparency of the image in a gradient.

"I just purchased Manifold GIS Release 5.00.  I'm impressed with all the features and relative intuitiveness of the program.  Actually it does more-or-less about the same thing as MicroImage's TNT MIPS.   Are you familiar with it?  It costs $5, 000.00! " - User comment. 

Unlimited Sized Projects with Unlimited Sized Images and Terrain Elevation Surfaces - Advanced memory management technology allows Manifold System to operate with no limit on the size of projects, no limit on the number of layers in maps and no limits on the size of images and surfaces.  

Remote sensing image processing -  Manifold includes sophisticated functions to combine data from multi-channel remote sensing image formats into synthetic RGB images, including a wide range of features for image enhancement using sophisticated algorithms.  

Image Fusion - Image fusion can produce images with vivid colors and high resolutions by combining  lower resolution color images and higher resolution panchromatic images.  Typical examples are:

• SPOT panchromatic image + Thematic Mapper multi-channel color image
• ETM panchromatic + Thematic Mapper color bands.
• IKONOS panchromatic + IKONOS color images.
• Satellite image + aerial photograph

Illustrations (right): The images at right show an ordinary Landsat image assembled from three bands.  The image at left shows an unenhanced natural color image assembled from three bands. The image at far right shows the same image enhanced by Manifold 6.50 with multiband information, including fusion of color Thematic Mapper bands and  high resolution panchromatic sensor data.  This is a classic example of image fusion. 

Seamless, smooth data raster layers - Using surfaces, Manifold can plot data variables in seamless raster layers that are automatically colored by value. Show temperature distributions, chemical plumes, population densities or any other variables in combination with images or vector drawing layers.  Manifold can create smooth raster data layers from unsmooth point data sets by automatic Kriging interpolation in a simple Copy the points drawing and Paste as a surface user interface.

Illustration (left): The image at left shows a US map overlaid with a false color gradient with editing of raster and vector layers.  It shows image editing effects but also conveys the "smooth raster" appearance of many data rasters.

Illustration (right)  - 3D surface generated from DEM data overlaid with a color orthophoto image and a vector drawing layer showing an open space region in green.  Map layers such as drawings and images can be overlaid on 3D terrains for fabulous, synthetic views of your data.  The illustration at right shows a region in San Luis Obispo County, California, courtesy of Robert Heitzman.  3D surface generated from DEM data overlaid with a color orthophoto image and a vector drawing layer showing an open space region in green. 

Integrated surfaces and terrains for 2D and 3D visualization - Manifold can import terrain elevation data from almost any format known and incorporate surfaces into maps as shaded 2D images showing relief, slope, aspect or visualized as realistic 3D terrain views. Terrains may be overlaid with any combination of vector drawings or raster images. Surfaces are also used to provide continuous gradient displays of data such as population, temperature or other variables. Surfaces may be shown automatically colored with custom palettes, by value or using preset palettes designed for fast and easy terrain visualization.  Perform waterline analysis or create slope and aspect maps.  Automatically create contour lines or area polygons from terrain surfaces.  Manifold's 3D visualization and 2D surface analytics are included within Manifold 6.50, but cost thousands of dollars and require separate packages from other GIS vendors.   See the Screen Shots page for more 3D images.

3D View of the Grand Canyon - Click on the thumbnail to see a terrain window, an automatic 3D view of elevation data in Release 6.50.   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 Release 6.50 as seen in the thumbnail at right.  6.50 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.

Detail (right): A terrain view of the Montara Mountain SDTS DEM in false color by elevation, overlaid with USGS roads from the same SDTS DLG quad topo map.

Detail (left): A terrain view showing the Grand Canyon using USGS DEM terrain elevation data.

"I must say I am a frustrated user of ESRI's ArcIMS and Mapinfo's MapXtreme. I hate them. Why exporting a map to a web involves taking lessons about Java servlets or server settings? But with Manifold, wow, is there anything so simple?"  - User comment.

Integrated Internet Map Server - Manifold includes a powerful Internet map server that can publish your maps to Internet for people worldwide to view. The map server allows browsing, panning, and zooming within maps that you choose to publish as well as support for queries, information tools and layer selection if desired. Advanced users can customize the map server to create spectacular Internet pages. Manifold IMS (Internet Map Server) 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, no programming and no costly middleware.  The map server is built into Manifold itself so that Manifold can be used as a WYSIWYG development environment to create a project.  Based on a few mouse clicks and choice of preset templates in the Export Web Page dialog, Manifold will automatically create a set of .asp pages to dynamically publish the project to the web.   Manifold IMS delivers blistering hot performance through sophisticated features, such as object pooling, that are tightly integrated with Microsoft Internet Information Server for maximum performance, security and reliability.  

Theater (above left)  - 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. 

Mexico (upper right)  - A demonstration Manifold IMS application that shows a map of Mexico with layers using zoom ranges to control which layers come on upon zoom in. Shows labels as a layer.  The "high compatibility" template is used to create a site that will work with older Internet browsers.

107th Congressional Districts (above right) - A demonstration Manifold IMS 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.

Programming the Manifold Internet Map Server - Manifold's Internet Map Server works great with default templates to create web sites without programming, but if you want to create custom web sites or add special capabilities you can do so easily using standard Microsoft .asp scripting.  The following examples show tutorial web sites that may be downloaded from the Free Stuff page to learn more advanced Manifold IMS programming techniques:

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 6.50 Geocoding Data product on the IMS machine as well as Manifold 6.50.   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.

Extraordinary Selection Capabilities - Manifold has the best selection commands and capabilities in GIS.  A variety of mouse-based, command-based, toolbar and language methods allow perfect selection with speed and power.  Unlike old-fashioned GIS packages, Manifold can actually transfer selections between images, surfaces and drawings within maps.  For example, select all pixels of temperature T in an raster temperature image and then automatically select all road lines in a drawings that fall within the selected pixel ranges.  Manifold provides saved selections and Boolean combinations between saved selections and the current selection, as well as Boolean selection combinations using mouse commands.  Manifold also supports Visual Studio style "smart mouse" auto-selection in drawings and programming forms.

Images above left: Manifold selection commands work in drawings, images and surfaces. The region in blue is subtracted from the selection in red to select only those pixels in red in the rightmost image. Image editing commands can then be restricted to operate only on selected pixels.

Superior Projections - Manifold includes thousands of projections (including a vast array of national grids) with all datums known to the US Government's National Imagery and Mapping Agency (lots!).  Project and re-project any image, drawing or surface into any projection.  Maps can use any projection desired and can consist of multiple layers where all the different layers have different "native" projections - the map will automatically project on the fly to show the contents in the desired projection.  Show the same image or drawing in different projections at the same time! Manifold uses high precision ellipsoidal trigonometric formulae to take advantage of the built-in, double-precision floating point accuracy of Manifold 6.50.  All geographic coordinates are maintained and computed to an accuracy of 1/250-millionth of a meter at all times.

 Images (left and right above): Manifold can re-project a latitude/longitude image like that at left into Orthographic projections such as the illustration at the top of this page, even including Polar aspects like that seen at right.  Cool!

"ArcView 3.2 can't georegister, but 8 can - although it's not as user friendly as Manifold." - User Comment (experienced user of both Manifold and ESRI ArcView, ArcINFO and ArcGIS 8).

Easy Georegistration - Georegister any image, drawing or surface using any other image, drawing, surface or set of control points.  Manifold will "rubber sheet" warp images, surfaces and raster data sets as necessary with automatica interopolation and pixel management from any projection into any other projection desired.  Fast and easy control point management allows precise placement of control points in a rapid workflow pattern.  Manifold includes three georegistration methods to allow tradeoffs between the number of control points that are placed and the precision of the georegistration.  These include a simple method and a numeric method as used by most high-end GIS packages. In addition only Manifold provides an affine georegistration that uses sophisticated mathematics to achieve georegistration with many fewer control points than are required by ordinary numeric methods.  Manifold 6.50 also automatically generates a root mean square error surface for immediate control of georegistration precision.  Manifold's fast and easy georegistration dialogs make it possible to scan paper maps and to rapidly make use of them in GIS digital mapping.

Australia Maps (above left and right): Beginning with a scanned paper map of Australia at upper left, Manifold can georegister the paper map so that it fits with existing digital vector maps at upper right.  Manifold can then trace the central area from the georegistered image to create a new vector map object at right.

Image (above left): A satellite photo of the San Francisco Bay region georegistered to a vector drawing of the same region, overlaid with a spectrum-colored error surface showing the quality of georegistration.  Manifold can automatically create error surfaces.  The error surface is shown using 50% transparency so the georegistered image can partially show through for orientation.

Superior Database Capability - Modern maps link the objects in drawings with records from database management systems. One can then use the map as a visual interface to the data. Manifold includes the most sophisticated database management system capabilities of any GIS system to allow work with tables linked to drawings, standalone tables or tables resident in remote database providers like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 or MySQL.  Manifold's database manipulation capabilities are so powerful they exceed those of most dedicated DBMS systems!  Including standard SQL, Manifold also includes Spatial SQL and "fuzzy logic" SQL extensions.  Unique to Manifold System the Transform Toolbar allows unprecedented manipulation of database tables without any SQL programming required.  Tables may be imported into a Manifold project or linked into the project from external providers. Manifold's database facilities are so strong that people will often use Manifold to explore and manage databases having nothing to do with maps.

"The actual database tools available for Manifold utterly kill ESRI's Arc(Anything)."  - User Comment (experienced user of both Manifold and ESRI ArcView, ArcINFO and ArcGIS 8).

Intrinsic Fields - Automatically computed values for objects in drawings that appear as table columns if you want them.  See locations, areas, bearings, lengths and similar without any need for computations or scripting.  They're built right in!  As one user put it: "The intrinsic fields in the data table can NOT be stated enough. I find it incredible that I can take a "stupid" AutoCAD drawing, with no attached data, and just bring it in and bang. I have a whole bunch of useful data attached. The centroid coordinates really are great. I use them almost every day. I even took my entire land parcel drawing, and brought it in just to get coordinate points, so now I have not only the areas, but the points to attach data to for certain labeling etc."

Active Columns - Active Columns (TM)  are like a combination of database tables, spreadsheet and ActiveX scripting.  Add an Active Column  to any table and specify the formula the Active Column should compute.  Automatically, the values for every row in the table will be computed and will be displayed in the column.   Suppose you have a table that shows areas of counties and the total population of the county but you wished you had a column that showed the population per square mile for each county. No problem! Add an Active Column called "Population Density" that divides the population by the area to report the result as population per square mile. Active Columns can be used like any field: click on the column head to sort by that field, use them to create labels automatically or any other purpose.   Active Columns can use any ActiveX formula written in VBscript, Javascript, PERL or Python (wow!) and even call subroutines for Active Column computations of unlimited sophistication.   The partial examples in the images above right and above left show a snippet of script that looks up a product category name from a "Categories" table for a table of product.  The Active Column appears as the Category Name column in the product table showing the category for each product listed in the table. The Category Name column works like any other: click on it to sort, etc.

ViewBots - ViewBots (tm) are cool computation bars that report an automatically updated computational result on what you tell them to watch. ViewBots can watch a layer or any selection or saved selection, and can also make a selection or transform the selection.  Instantly see statistics and arithmetic measures for the fields being watched. Easy to use! Only Manifold gives you ViewBots.  Illustration (right): ViewBots can be used for many purposes, like finding all duplicated fields.  Cool!

"More Like This" Technology  - Manifold System 6.50 is the first and only GIS at any price to include a sophisticated neurofuzzy inferencing engine that powers Manifold's "More Like This" technology.  With a single mouse click "More Like This" harnesses the incredible artificial intelligence power of neurofuzzy inferencing without programming: open a table and right click on a record and choose More Like This from the pop-up menu.  Manifold will automatically resort the table so that records similar to the one you clicked on will be at the top.  Working with a demographic database and a county with a particular combination of per-capita income, educational status and housing density catches your eye?  Find more counties like that one with More Like This in a single mouse click. How does it work?  Manifold knows what database columns are in view and it knows the contents of the database.  Based on the record selected Manifold automatically creates a fuzzy query and launches the integrated neurofuzzy engine to  find more records like the one you are interested in.  It works so well the results are positively spooky, like magic!

Decision Support System  - While "More Like This" provides a fully automated, single mouse-click way of using the Manifold neurofuzzy engine, the Decision Support System provides a more flexible, point-and-click console for creating, editing and viewing sophisticated queries using fuzzy logic.  "Fuzzy" logic allows queries that automatically make tradeoffs in a flexible way to find information that traditional SQL queries cannot.  For example, if searching for a new home that has a "short" commute with "good" schools SQL would force you to specify fixed criteria. Perhaps you would search for a home that was within 10 miles of work with a school district that had an average math SAT score of 650.  However, such queries would miss homes that had an 11 mile commute and a school district with average math SAT scores of 720.  You might want to make the tradeoff of one more mile of commute to get a truly extraordinary school district, but old fashioned SQL won't let you.  Manifold's Decision Support System provides a point and click, visual way of specifying that you would like a "short" commute and "high" educational achievement that will automatically make tradeoffs using the neurofuzzy engine to score combinations that match exceptionally well your desired criteria.  No other GIS at any price includes a Decision Support System.  Illustration (above right): A DSS query to find a nice place to live.  The Hedge column let's you "nudge" a query by emphasizing or de-emphasizing a particular criterion.

Vectorization / Digitization -  The process of creating a new digital map often starts with an aerial photograph, a satellite photo or a scanned paper map.  Manifold includes powerful features to create new digital maps from images and raster scans by using a powerful set of manual and automatic tools.  Use any combination of images, surfaces or drawing layers seen together to create a new map.

Rasterization - Publishing vector drawings often requires rasterization, the conversion of the vector drawing to a raster image.  Manifold can automatically rasterize any view that includes any combination of components.   Rasterization is often used for specialized graphics arts effects as well. For example, drop shadows can be created beneath vector lines by first rasterizing the vector lines and then applying a Gaussian blur effect 

Point and Click Transform Toolbar - Manifold tames complicated operations with drawings, tables, images and surfaces by encapsulating them in a point-and-click Transform Toolbar at the bottom of the display.  The toolbar provides hundreds of operators that are automatically loaded to match the window type that has the focus.  For example, drawing windows will have network analysis operators available while table windows will have operators for copying and summing fields.

"Manifold's spatial analysis is on par with ArcInfo's, and head and shoulders above for actual data analysis" - User Comment (experienced user of both Manifold and ESRI ArcView, ArcINFO and ArcGIS 8).

Superior Spatial Analytics - In addition to Spatial SQL, Manifold includes numerous subsystems and capabilities for spatial analysis and transformations.  Each field in any drawing's table can have a Transfer Rule that specifies how that field will be combined in 1 to N and N to 1 spatial transformations.  The transfer rule will be used by spatial operators such as Spatial Overlays (point in polygon, polygon in polygon, etc) operations or in Transform Toolbar spatial operators.  For example when using the Centroids operator to find the centroid of a selection of points the  N to 1  transfer rule might be set to assign the Average value of a given field from all the different points to the centroid.   If using point in polygon operations to transfer the values of all points in an area to the area object and the field of interest is a population, one might use Sum as the transfer rule so that the population values of the points in the area are summed to find the total population in that area.   Manifold has a vast array of spatial operators for use in spatial analytics, including 27 different operators for different combinations of points, lines and area overlays (Areas to contained points, Areas to contained areas, Areas to intersecting areas, Areas to contained lines, Areas to adjacent areas, etc, etc).

"Very difficult to copy features from one drawing to another in ArcGIS (almost impossible in ArcView 3.2); very easy in Manifold, just copy/paste ;-)" - User Comment (experienced user of both Manifold and ESRI ArcView, ArcINFO and ArcGIS 8).

Superior Spatial Editing - Manifold includes sophisticated Boolean editing operations that allow unions, dissolves, clips and other operations using some objects to "cookie cutter" other objects or to combine objects using their data fields as a guide.  Manifold's spatial editing operators are unusually sophisticated in that they can work with any combination of objects no matter how bizarre the topology.  For example, a pattern of areas that include multiple branches including disjoint "islands" and "holes" can be used to cookie-cut through other lines, points and similarly disjoint areas without problems.  Manifold is the only interactive GIS system that can perform such complex operations while automatically maintaining and cleaning topology on the fly.  

Automatic Contouring - Manifold can automatically create vector drawings from surfaces that show contours as areas or lines.  Contours can be created for regions above given heights for a "wedding cake" effect, regions below heights or regions between heights.  Intervals may be specified individually or a sequence of heights can be automatically generated at a desired interval range. Image (right): Contours generated as colored areas and overlaid on a shaded relief terrain surface.  Contours are just as easily generated as lines.

Statistics and Analysis - Manifold’s operators and analytic subsystems include hundreds of analytic capabilities in statistics, general purpose mathematics, network analysis, graph theory, database logic, topology and computational geometry. Active Columns™ and ViewBots™ provide a new style of interactive analysis that's easy to use.  Transform operators with drawings include sophisticated network operators such as automatic creation of Gabriel Networks, Relative Neighborhood Network, Spanning Tree, Clusters detection, Emergency Center and Service Center siting, Shortest Path,  Delaunay Triangulation and more.  Geometry operators include Voronoi diagrams, Buffer Zones of various types, Centroids using circle, box or center of balance, Cluster detection using standard and Zahn algorithms and many more.

Integrated GPS Capability - Manifold can work with any NMEA compatible GPS device connected to your computer's serial port.   Use the GPS for a "moving map" effect to automatically move the map as you travel.  Automatic data acquisition can sample the GPS on demand or automatically  by time interval. This is a great way to create new maps: farmers who want to map their property can simply rig up a laptop computer running Manifold with a portable GPS and then drive the boundaries of their ranch and the roads to create a new map.  Cities can mark their assets by simply driving to different locations and using the GPS console to mark the locations of fire hydrants, bridges, electrical equipment or other assets.  WAAS-equipped GPS devices now retail for under $200 and can provide 2 meter accuracy - a great way to create new maps with Manifold!

Charts - Manifold 6.50 includes fast and easy 2D charting.  Create a chart from any numeric field in any table, or show multiple fields at the same time.  Group and order fields automatically in the X axis using any field for better comprehension of data that makes more sense when aggregated.  Manifold will automatically label axes using ordinary or logarithmic scales.

Customization - Using industry standard XML files Manifold 6.50 may be easily customized to add new point styles, thematic palettes, units of measure, ellipsoids, datums and projection presets.  Scripts may be easily added as menu items in the Tools menu and/or as command buttons to the Custom toolbar. Illustration (right): Custom point styles added from graphics files.

Powerful Programming Included -  At no additional cost, Manifold 6.50 includes a complete programming system for scripting in Microsoft ActiveX scripting languages (Manifold is a Microsoft ActiveX scripting host). The power of Manifold System may be extended by writing scripts in Visual Basic Scripting Edition or Javascript, the default languages used in Manifold. Free downloads allow scripting in other languages as well, such as PERL and Python. The Manifold scripting environment includes a script editor as well as a sophisticated drag and drop Forms creation editor in the style of Visual Studio that allows visual creation of forms using a wide range of included Microsoft controls. A wide array of alignment controls makes it easy to create forms with evenly sized and well-spaced controls.  Manifold also may be programmed from external applications written in Microsoft standard languages such as Visual Basic or Visual C++. For casual customization, Manifold includes Active Columns, ViewBots and SQL "ad hoc" programming.

Windows Copy / Paste Paradigm - Manifold uses standard Windows power moves like Copy and Paste to make conversions and to move data about.  Want to see a geocoded table as a drawing in a map?  Simply Copy the table and Paste As a map - automatically, points will appear for the table's records.  Have a map that shows European cities and want a table of their latitudes and longitudes?  No problem! Copy the drawing and Paste As a table.  You can even Copy an image and Paste As a table to see a table of the RGB values for image pixels. When transforming data using copy and paste, Manifold will automatically pop open dialogs allowing user choices in a very flexible way.  For example, when pasting a drawing as a table, Manifold can automatically compute numerous "intrinsic fields" for objects in drawings, such as Latitude and Longitude, X and Y coordinates in native projections or pixel image coordinates, Area, Length and Bearing of lines, selection status and more.

Unlimited windows and layers - Open many different images, surfaces, drawings, tables or maps at once and Copy and Paste between .  Open the same component in multiple windows at once and pan and zoom and navigate all windows independently.  You can even open the same map in multiple windows and see each one in a different projection!  Use Linked Views to "steer" one window by clicking in a different window: for example, one view might be greatly zoomed in while another view shows an overview.  Click in the overview window to "steer" the detailed view.

"You guys have a great product!  I'm very happy to have found it.  The documentation/examples, user interface, functional design, your timely support responses.....everything adds up to a very good thing!" - User Comment

Spectacular, Printable Documentation – Manifold's Help user manual includes 1000 topics comprising over 4500 pages of documentation covering all aspects of the system with easy user introductions, detailed reference sections and over 40 major, step-by-step tutorial examples plus over 60 other detailed examples.  The manual includes over 3000 color illustrations that show all aspects of use in detailed illustrations.  The Help file includes a detailed index and thousands of hyperlinks to allow instant navigation between topics to relevant data. 

"...the manual explains things in a very logical way...... puts many other software manuals to shame... it actually answers what you want to know and does not just tell you what  is already visually obvious!" - User Comment

Starter Data Sets on CD - The Manifold CD contains hundreds of megabytes of cool maps with which to get started.  World data sets include world countries in high, medium and low resolution, with and without provinces, plus lakes and rivers, ocean bathymetry, most airports, cities, named places, hydrography features and other layers. US data includes states and counties, ZIP centroids, cities, ZCTAs (ZIP codes as areas), named places, railroads, Federal lands, Airports, Parks, Time Zones and indices to the extensive USGS maps that may be downloaded free from Internet.  One CD is but a drop in the ocean of free data that can be downloaded for use with Manifold via Internet. 

Room to Grow - Manifold System is evolving faster than any other GIS system.  The manifold.net development team rapidly implements the wishes of the Manifold user community, with new features emerging in Service Packs and new releases much faster than any other GIS.   Each release of Manifold system includes thousands of suggestions and cool ideas from our highly active and highly demanding user community.  Manifold System 6.50 Professional already includes reserved words, menu locations and panes for feature expansions planned for the 2002 service pack and release campaign.  manifold.net accomplishes in weeks what some GIS companies take years to do with the wishes of our user community as our guide.

Full Screen Illustrations

The thumbnails in this section expand to show full screen displays of Manifold System 6.50 operating on a high-resolution monitor. Full size screen shots are typically 700KB in size or larger.  

Click on the thumbnail at left for a working view of Manifold 6.50 being used to assemble a complete set of USGS 1:24K-scale SDTS DEMs (digital elevation data) surfaces for the San Francisco Bay region.  The diagonal slash of the San Andreas fault is seen running from upper left to lower right along the San Francisco peninsula.   A base drawing of the Bay area is overlaid with an index to USGS 1:24K "quads" so that the data may be easily fetched from free Internet servers.  A terrain coloring dialog is open showing the application of one of Manifold's many preset palettes.

Click on the thumbnail at right for an 800K screen shot of a Release 6.50 desktop showing image editing of a satellite view of Washington, DC, with Transform toolbar and map.

Faster, Smarter and more Capable than ESRI ArcView, ArcGIS 8 or MapInfo Professional ...

Don't get stuck using antique, "toy" GIS packages when you need serious combinations of raster and vector layers.  Manifold Release 6.50 integrates raster images perfectly with vector layers.  Raster images may be re-projected as desired as no other GIS can do and recombined in layers in a way rivaled only by professional raster graphics packages such as Adobe PhotoShop.  Click on the thumbnail at right to see a 162KB shot of 6.50 being used as a graphics arts editor to compose multiple layered images using transparency and other effects.  Three images are layered together to form a composite image.  Two of the images use per-pixel transparency guided by other images that are used as masks.  These are expert-level operations that in some cases exceed the state of the art of professional graphics arts editors.  Awesome!

See a detailed discussion of Manifold, ESRI ArcView, ArcInfo 8.1 and AutoDesk Map in a recent posting to Manifold-L.

Neither ESRI ArcView nor MapInfo Professional v6 can project images at all, let alone project them on the fly into simultaneous, different map views using different projections.  Full usage of raster images within a sophisticated GIS environment requires a large and sophisticated array of capabilities such as per-pixel transparency, integrated raster/vector selections, sophisticated layer controls and many other capabilities.  Neither ESRI ArcView nor MapInfo Professional v6 come close to the sophisticated raster capability built into Manifold Release 6.50.  

"Manifold does more than ArcGIS (which I teach) (It is also 1000 times more stable!) or ArcView (which has been the source of my income for the last 8 years)." - User Comment

Click on the thumbnail at left for a 282K screenshot showing multiple simultaneous projections of the same image. It shows 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.  If your GIS (like MapInfo or ArcView) cannot re-project images you should be paying lot less for it than the $245 cost of Manifold Release 6.50. Why pay much more and get much less?

Transparency:  Release 6.50 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 left 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 transaprency.  Neat!  You can't do that with MapInfo Professional version 6 nor ESRI ArcView, no matter how much money you burn.  Invisible pixels are possible, in theory, with ArcView but only with near-infinite hand manipulation of color maps. Neither MapInfo nor ArcView allow percent transparency in layers or (don't even think about it!) per pixel percent transparency.  

Thumbnail at above left: 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.

Click on the thumbnail at right for a 730K screen shot showing images of the San Francisco Bay region combined with vector layers.  The Landsat 7 image (originally shot in Space Oblique Mercator) was assumed to be an Orthographic image.  It's 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 using the small image in the lower left of the display. 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!

US Street Address Geocoding Option

Manifold System includes an option for US Street Address geocoding, which allows automatic location of addresses by latitude and longitude.  See a detailed, point-for-point comparison between the Manifold Geocoder that is a $100 option for Manifold System Release 6.50 and MapInfo's $8,950 MapMarker geocoder.  Manifold's geocoder provides the same accuracy as MapMarker, and delivers all key features MapMarker does, but Manifold's geocoder also provides numerous powerful and sophisticated features MapMarker does not have.  Save $8,850 and get a better geocoder to boot!  See the Street Address Geocoding topic in the Manifold 6.50 user manual for additional details. 

Technical Support and Upgrades

Manifold System 6.50 Licenses are currently provided with two Technical Support incidents at no additional charge for installation and interactive features (excluding Developer level features such as scripting, programming, map serving and SQL).  Support products offered by manifold.net are listed on the Products page, and include discounted incidents for standard technical support as well as Developer technical support incidents.

All support resources provided on the manifold.net web site are free of charge, including any service packs that may be published.  New editions of Manifold are offered to licensees of the previous edition at substantial discounts.  

Illustrations (right) - Manifold can show digital elevation data as 3D terrains using a wide variety of synthetic textures and terrain colorings, sky styles and true sun angles to provide "natural" looking 3D views.  These can then be overlaid with vector drawing or images, like scanned topo maps.  The illustrations at right show a synthetic 3D view, a scanned topo map and finally the 3D terrain overlaid with the topo map image.  Illustrations created and contributed by James Burn.

Requirements and Limitations

Manifold System 6.50 runs with Windows Server 2003 (both 32 bit and x64 editions),  XP (both 32 bit and x64 editions), 2000,  ME, 98SE and 98. Windows 95 and Windows NT are no longer supported,.  A reasonably modern PC with at least 128MB of RAM and at least 50MB of disk space is required.  Memory and hard disks are cheap in modern times, so most users will have at least 256MB to 1GB of RAM and over 50 GB of free space even on very inexpensive, entry-level PCs. IE 6 must be installed on the system even if you choose to use a different browser, such as Opera, as your default browser.  The IE installation is used to assure that the Windows system is fully upgraded with all required XML parsing and ActiveX scripting Windows components.

Users of older Windows systems will experience some limitations.  Users of 16 bit Windows systems (Windows 98, 98SE and ME) may experience memory limitations when working with large images or projects  due to the inability of 16 bit Windows systems to correctly handle large memory spaces. Support for older 16 bit Windows editions is expected to end soon.

manifold.net recommends use of Microsoft Windows 2003, Windows XP or Windows 2000. Manifold will run in 64 bit Windows Server 2003 and XP versions, including use of  x64 dual core processors such as AMD Athlon 64 X2.  Current Manifold editions run in 32 bit mode on 64 bit systems ,but because the 64 bit systems are faster than 32 bit systems and because Manifold leverages Microsoft code whenever possible users will experience performance gains on 64 bit systems. Likewise, users of dual core 64 bit processors will experience performance gains as system tasks and other overhead take advantage of the dual core to enable Manifold to run faster.

Other than the practical limits imposed by machine speed and the user's patience, there are no intrinsic limits on the number of objects, layers, components or other aspects of a Manifold project.  If you have enough free disk space, Manifold 6.50 can work with projects of unlimited size, including unlimited sized images or surfaces as well as drawings and tables up to 16 exabytes each. The maximum project size supported by Manifold is 16,000,000,000 gigabytes, or 16 exabytes, however, this limit will normally not be reached due to limitations in file storage systems.  It's nice to know that as hardware improves, Manifold won't limit you!

Product Options

Professional Edition with Debugger - Manifold System 6.50 Professional Edition already includes the ability to write and execute scripts using a built-in script editor and forms environment.  The Debugger option adds the ability to stop, pause and restart scripts automatically at user-specified breakpoints, to see the value of any variable or execution context, to see the execution status within the call stack and to jump into, over or through subroutines, and to see the value of any user-specified programming expression in the Watches pane.  Programs can be paused, the value of variables changed and then programs restarted using the new values. See the Debugger page for details.  The Professional Edition with Debugger is $295.  If you already have Professional Edition you can upgrade to Professional Edition with Debugger for only $50.

Enterprise Edition - Enterprise Edition includes all Professional Edition and Debugger features and also extends Manifold so users can save and share drawings, images, tables, maps, scripts, and other components within geospatial databases hosted in multi-user DBMS products like Oracle, SQL Server, IBM DB2, MySQL and many others. Such geospatial databases are called Enterprise servers.  Enterprise Edition allows multiple users to share the same components and to edit them without fear of multi-user conflicts.  Enterprise Edition also adds the ability to write ArcInfo .e00 files for easy data interchange with legacy GIS packages.

Geocoding Data - The $100 Manifold Geocoding Data option turns on the geocoder that's built into Manifold System. See the comparison to a popular $9000 industry geocoder (MapInfo's MapMarker) to see how Manifold compares!

Compare Professional, Debugger and Enterprise Editions - See a simplified table that compares the three Manifold editions.

Buy Now ! 

A Steal at Twice the Price! - Manifold System Release 6.50 Professional is priced at only $245: that's the best deal ever in GIS!   The data alone on the Manifold CD sells for hundreds of dollars from other vendors.   Plus, the spectacular image manipulation, surface and 3D terrain, spatial, networking, and topological commands included in 6.50 Professional often sell for thousands of dollars from other vendors.  Finally, the Manifold Internet Map Server built into Manifold 6.50 easily outperforms other map servers that sell for thousands of dollars. 

Call 800-556-5919 today to order your copy of Release 6.50 Professional, or teleport right away to the Manifold.net Online Store to buy a copy right now!

Quotes from user comments on this page have been received by email or posted in the Manifold-L discussion list and on www.georeference.org appear in our Testimonials page.

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