b.yetman » Spatial Search takes a voyage to the desktop

Sep

Spatial Search takes a voyage to the desktop

You know that neurotic data czar down the hall that’s always bragging about his GIS data organization skills… yah, get ready to blow his mind. Modern-day mapmakers and classic cartographers alike can now bring search 2.0 to their neo-spatial production workflows: introducing Voyager.
Voyager is a desktop crawler designed specifically for indexing a wide array of spatial data formats. Let it loose and it catalogs everything from feature classes to layer files, giving you a holistic list of raster to mxd and everything in between. Think Google Desktop designed specifically for spatial data.

Voyager indexing supports:” scanned maps, satellite imagery, elevation models, vector data, CAD formats; as well as server resources, such as data stored in ArcSDE© technology, ArcGIS Server© and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) formats such as KML, WMS, WFS.”

As one user reflected “it’s like iTunes for your GIS data”…

Voyager’s desktop interface let’s you search your data by keyword or type, and then drill down . Within the detailed view you can see what the dataset is, and everywhere it’s being used. Some of the benefits include:

See what data a map document is using without having to actually open it.
Better harness cartographic design investments that you’ve already made by finding layers from all your maps.
Quickly find thematic spatial data on your local machine, or a network share drive.
Determine which documents have broken datasources, dependencies, and beyond.

Creators Brian Goldin and Ryan McKinley have hit a homerun with this first super beta release. Besides the initial indexing processor overhead, it’s a totally smooth experience. Voyager is currently available in 3 versions for personal, workgroup, and enterprise users.