DatMapR was written by me, Adrian Middleton, a self-confessed geek who, as well as having a degree in Geology, spent 20 years designing, producing, crashing and maintaining Management Information Systems, mainly for a 'well known high-street name'. I am a bit of a ‘Data Magpie’ and therefore I often find myself needing to make sense of lots of data.
DatMapR has evolved through three major stages, called DisMap, DatMap, and now DatMapR (even I couldn’t call it D’uder’Map).
DisMap was written in 2005 purely for my own use to produce maps using statistical data from the Countryside Information System (www.cis-web.org.uk) as part of research done as a volunteer at Museums Sheffield. This data included ‘Land-Use’ data originating from the 'Land Cover Map 2000' and topographic data originally from the Ordnance Survey. DisMap was written using Visual Basic within Microsoft Access to produce simple ‘dot’ maps based on numeric data held in Access, and was limited by its dependence on Access to provide the data handling required. Though no longer maintained, DisMap is still available from the author's web site (www.middlea.freeserve.co.uk).
Its successor, DatMap, was written as a stand-alone application, but again was simply for the numeric and statistical data. Initially it was used to produce maps to accompany papers for the Sorby Natural History Society, arising from the above research done at Museums Sheffield.
DatMap has now been superceded, and is unlikely to be enhanced further since its functionality is covered (and extended) in DatMapR. It too is available from the author's web site (www.middlea.freeserve.co.uk).
DatMapR was developed in 2011 to provide flexible mapping of Text and Numeric data provided in a 'record' format (hence the 'R' in DatMapR). DatMapR was initially written to produce maps for a number of other people who record the natural history of the area, and who needed to cater for text data such as Species Names, Recorder, etc.
DatMapR, like DatMap, has been written using Real Studio, an object oriented integrated development environment (IDE) available from RealSoftware.com. This includes its own programming language, Real Basic, and relational database facilities based on SQLite. Real Studio produces applications that call upon standard system resources for file opening, printing, etc. DatMapR has been developed using these facilities to include its own data handling and storage, as well as its mapping functions.
Though Real Studio can be used to produce applications for Linux and Mac platforms, DatMapR has currently only been built for Windows.
No doubt DatMapR will evolve further – so keep an eye of the News Blog on the web-site (or ‘subscribe’ using the RSS link), or on my 'other' site at www.middlea.freeserve.co.uk (which includes copies of the Sorby NHS papers mentioned above (under the Heading ‘Green Sheffield’), or even on the DatMapR Twitter feed (@DatMapRSupport) where I will mention new releases as they happen.
