The Forestry Division of the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the University of Wisconsin have used the TatukGIS Developer Kernel (DK) toolkit to create the Forestry GIS (fGIS™), a free, basic GIS data viewer, digitizer and shapefile editing program for Windows®. The fGIS software is designed for resource managers who want to make land cover maps for management plans, timber harvests, reforestation or other projects. The Wisconsin DNR has been a DK-VCL licensed user (in a Delphi™ environment) since May 2003.
This client informs TatukGIS that the fGIS program is ideal for tracing over aerial photographs and other images. fGIS opens geo-referenced digital orthophotos and topographic maps in MrSID�, JPEG, TIFF, GeoTIFF, BMP and PNG file formats. It saves point, line and area vector data in the ESRI® shapefile format. The program can load very large data layers and gives complete control over display properties. Users can designate the scale at which maps are printed. For foresters that have wanted to engage in GIS, but were held back by the expense and perceived complexity, fGIS is designed to bring down the barriers.
The fGIS application is part of a larger plan for the development of GIS standards for forestry practices to support private forest stewardship planning in the State of Wisconsin. With the creation of the fGIS application from the royalty-free DK toolkit, the DNR can equip its employees and cooperating private foresters in the state of Wisconsin with operational mapping tools at a tiny fraction of what the purchase and training for mainline GIS programs would entail.
Also note worthy, this is perhaps the first time that the DK toolkit has been used to create a GIS application that supports the MrSID� image format. This client implemented the MrSID� support with the DK-MrSID Wrapper provided by TatukGIS to DK licensed users that have purchased the MrSID decode SDK.
For more details and information on how to download fGIS, click here.
For the quote provided by this client, click here.