City combines CAD and GIS : Garden Grove's GIS system blends Autodesk Map 3D and MapGuide
One of the goals of the latest version of Map 3D is to make it easier to integrate GIS data. "There has been a big push to integrate spatial data. The idea is to bring it together in a central store and combine that with information from other departments within a city, such as accounting and customer relations," says Chris Bradshaw, vice president of Autodesk's Infrastructure Solutions Division. Bradshaw says that Map 3D is particularly adept at pulling together data from different sources.
Map 3D supports AutoCAD DWG and DXF formats; Arc/Info coverages, exports and shapefiles; MapInfo MIF/MID formats; MicroStation DGN files; spatial data transfer standards; GML 2 (geography markup language) formats; and raster formats such as GeoTiff, Geospot, JPG, Earth Resource Mapping's ECW and LizardTech's MrSID. Map 3D also provides links directly to external warehouses, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Paradox, dBase V and III, Microsoft Access and other ODBC-compliant databases. Because Map 3D can read Autodesk's DWG file format, there are no problems with integrating data from other Autodesk products, including older versions.
The ability to work with so many different file formats in Map 3D makes it even easier for organizations to unlock spatial data from proprietary systems and share it with other departments within the organization. "When you have data that has to flow from the engineering world to the GIS world, you can carry the level of detail with you," says Mark Christian, a member of the Autodesk Infrastructure Solutions Division support team. "There is no loss of quality of the data."
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