Maptitude Mapping Software Donated to USGIF Academic Partners

Maptitude is geographic information system software that allows users to visualize data, create maps, and analyze geographic data in order to make business decisions. The software is beneficial to college students, helping students further apply geospatial techniques to their studies. Universities are eager to offer Maptitude as a new resource to their students.

"USGIF is collaborating with Caliper to help support our academic partners’ efforts to expand students’ career choices into areas like business intelligence, public health, emergency preparedness, urban planning and transportation, ecology, criminal justice, etc.," said USGIF Director of Academic Programs Dr. Camelia Kantor, "The software will allow students to spatially understand how decisions affect business as well as visualize, analyze, and convey geographic information in new and compelling ways."

"Having Maptitude in my classroom is providing students a new way of thinking about community development," said Talbot Brooks, director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Information Technologies at Delta State University. "Maptitude will help our students learn how to match business and community development needs to our local geography. More importantly, it will provide a means for local geospatial professionals to create easy-to-understand guidance for our local leaders when it comes to making decisions about investing in critical infrastructure, creating tax breaks, and similar."

Dr. Michael Tiefelsdorf, professor at University of Texas at Dallas, has used Maptitude in his graduate and undergraduate courses for non-GIS students. “In my view, a one-semester GIS introductory course with Maptitude gives non-GIS students a powerful set of tools and a broad spectrum of data with a benign learning curve,” said Tiefelsdorf.

Caliper is excited to donate Maptitude to USGIF-partner students.

"The ease-of-use, integration, and common GIS tools provided in Maptitude facilitate the adoption of GIS by a broader range of students," said Stewart Berry, vice president of product management, mapping software at Caliper. "Maptitude has proven to be an excellent tool for students studying GIS, business geography, location intelligence, and environmental issues. The software integrates well with other vendor products, and natively supports formats such as Shapefiles. This allows students to get up and running quickly with an integrated and commercial grade GIS while being able to use the software at school and at home for coursework and research."