Pitney Bowes MapInfo Vertical Mapper - Manual (Page 18)

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Vertical Mapper 3.7
Using Vertical Mapper to Display Spatial Data
Vertical Mapper brings two main benefits to MapInfo Professional:
• It provides a mapping technique for calculating and displaying the trends of data that vary
continuously over geographic space.
• It provides a mechanism for sophisticated comparison and analysis of multiple map layers.
Three main object types are currently used by MapInfo Professional to represent the spatial
distribution of data: regions, lines, and points. None of these objects is very well suited to
representing data that varies continuously through space such as ground-level air temperature,
elevation, distance from a store location, or the distribution of wealth across a city. Values for this
type of data must all be collected at discrete locations, but the way they change over space is very
significant. Traditional ways of indicating variation are labeling individual sample locations with a
known value, creating graduated symbols at each sample site, where the size reflects the sample’s
value, and generating contour lines or regions depicting locations of equal value (next figure).
Three examples of how a traditional vector-based GIS system, such as MapInfo
Professional, displays data that varies continuously.
The problem with these methods is that they do not portray how the data changes between known
locations.
To address this problem, Vertical Mapper creates a type of spatial data representation for MapInfo
Professional called a grid. Grids enable you to represent data as a continuous coverage. You can
see how values change in space and query any location to obtain a meaningful value.