I'm looking for examples of Manifold IMS websites. I am particularly interested in Government sites; Canadian websites would be ideal but, anywhere would do.

I have a client interested in using Manifold but, wants to see some real examples of Manifold IMS in use.

I have only had one private response to this query and unfortuately the URL supplied didn't work. The only Manifold IMS website I found was here: http://www.carboncountyutah.com/ims/.

Manifold's website has its own IMS examples, found here: http://www.manifold.net/products/freestuff.html, but it doesn't appear to have links to 'real world' examples, although they do welcome companies to post links to their IMS sites.

So why the dearth of Manifold IMS websites? Are people only developing closed intranet sites or does Manifold IMS lack something that puts users off creating their own sites?

I have managed successfully to create a Manifold IMS webpage (on a closed network!) and can have my colleagues access it, but I haven't tried to get into customizing it yet; Is it worth getting deeper into using IMS or should I just be happy with the great Manifold GIS tools and leave the IMS for another day?

Brian

I host quite a few sites but they are private - i.e. the site is accessed through the internet but you have to have a valid logon to see them. Eventually I will have a demo site that shows off all the capabilities of my services.

Since I already do a bit of work for you, perhaps we can arrange to meet and I can show you some of what I have out there now and in development.

Customizing your website requires a very different skill set than using Manifold, so you might be better suited focusing on Manifold for now.

Don't expect, suggest!

Now at AquaResource

I'll certainly take you up on you offer Dave, it will interesting to see what a guru of Manifold can do with the IMS. I am busy this week, I'll contact you direct to try and arrange the where and when.

Well lets see. It's a 10 minute walk to your office...

Don't expect, suggest!

Now at AquaResource

It just so happens that I was going to post this very subject because I am looking for examples to show during my presentation at a GIS Conference that attracts GIS users from a multistate area. As it stands now, I only have the same link mentioned here and one about Tsunamis

http://applicazioni.mapserver.it/manifold/tsunami/default.asp

However, there must be a reason why, as Brian mentions, that there are not more to be found. Is it that the public users are still stuck using the expensive big company software?? I sure wanted to generate some interest in Manifold in Minnesota, but have not had any luck. Of course it would help if I knew something about programming and script writing. I might have to scrap my plans for deploying Manifold IMS in place of an open source method for that reason. Had some problems with editing in IE and had to use FireFox.?

thanks, jim

Hi Jim

Thanks for the link, another one I can add to my IMS examples.

As Dave and others who responded directly stated there are a number of private sites that require usernames/passwords. They appear to make up the majority of Manifold IMS sites at present.

I think you are right about the big corporations and various government bodies are still using the more recognized IMS products.

Our research indicates several effects:

1) Most IMS sites are private, intranet sites. They are used for confidential information that people do not want to share with the general public, or the site is an integral part of an internal business process.

This is not a suprising outcome as most business and organizational processes are indeed private. For example, the number of Access databases that are web-enabled are a microscopically small percentage of the overall number of Access databases that can be used via internal networks.

It is also surprisingly common for intranet usage to involve a lot of sites. I think that is because there are very many internal applications that involve publication of GIS data with lightweight browsing and it is highly cost effective in such cases to buy a single license for a server and then let everyone use the application via a free browser.

I believe the record holder in this area is a company that uses Manifold IMS to do an internal application which is deployed in over 500 sites around the world. They deploy runtime licenses using the 100+ discount schedule so it is cheap for them (only $5000 for 100 licenses or only $25,000 for a deployment of 500 IMS sites).

By the way, I doubt you could identify 500 functioning ArcIMS sites even considering ESRI's entire installed ArcIMS base, yet that is only a single Manifold customer.

2) Most IMS sites that are on the Internet are not published URLs. There are several reasons for this:

a) They contain private information like those on intranets.

b) They use a subscription model to gain access to information.

c) The owner does not want to spend bandwidth in an uncontrolled way, either for machine throughput or for the pipe. This makes sense, as publishing just one URL wordlwide can quickly overwhelm a small site. Even towns and other government sites are often run on what is relatively small equipment, such as a single server, and the person responsible for the site does not want to lose services for his local users because people from all over the planet are hitting the site. For example, I know several people who operate community sites and who I have seen participate in georeference.org but who did not respond to this posting.

d) The owner does not participate in georeference.org or other forums and simply doesn't bother to advertise the web site broadly. This appears to be a significant factor, as a very small percentage of Manifold users ever even lurk in the forums, let alone post. We do our best to promote the forums but can't seem to get people to participate except for small percentage of what appear to be elite users. We can tell this is a factor from our tech support reporting, as it is clear that numerous people are doing IMS stuff and actually buying development incidents when it would be faster and cheaper for them to simply participate in georeference.org. I suspect part of this is because some people just want to pay for "on-demand," for-sure support and are impatient with the process of posting to a forum and hoping for responses, but being a very cheap person by nature I just don't get it.

e) The owner is embarassed about how the web site might be perceived by more expert peers. I have personally received many emails pointing out different IMS sites to me that have been accompanied by a request not to tell anyone else the URL "because it's not yet finished" even though it is running in production mode with ordinary users.

f) The operator does not want anyone to know the site has been done with Manifold. Quite often, the costs charged for the creation of a big-time IMS site are high, over $100,000, and the developer does not want anyone to know their cost for the actual IMS software was only a $200 runtime license. Because of the very high cost of legacy GIS and legacy IMS software, clients often expect that a GIS-enabled web site will be expensive and the smart consultant will not argue with them about that. :-)

3) In addition to the above points that have been established through actual marketing research, I'd offer my own intuition that the politics of promotion of non-Manifold IMS sites result in more noise than installations. There are three sub-effects here:

a) To move a very small number of units at very high unit prices, legacy vendors must use an advertising and reference-sell business model that almost forces them to puff up their actual results. For all the noise about ArcIMS, for example, there are virtually no bona-fide (that is, real production sites not subsidized in some way by ESRI) ArcIMS sites out there - my guess is there are most a few hundred. It appears that only a minority of ArcIMS licenses sold ever result in real, funcitoning sites. But, every slight possibility of a running ArcIMS site is emphatically merchandised by ESRI.

There are also heavily subsidized sites run by various agencies that virtually no one uses. These are best understood as make-work for bureaucrats and not as real sites that make sense as an actual GIS application. Good examples are the various "interoperability demonstrations" of idiot-class OGC "applications" which cost millions to do but ultimately are not used in real life.

b) The open source community is notorious for credulous repetition of "toy" sites as part of the politics of convincing itself that people do, indeed, actually use open source in ways that rival Microsoft technology. Every small, even theoretical usage is promoted, but little appears as actual business usage. Note that one of the hallmarks of real usage is that people don't talk about it much because it is not considered so astonishing... it just gets used like any other tool.

c) Manifold.net does not advertise, nor do we reference sell. You'll never hear a citation from us pointing to any user.

So, for the above reasons there appears to be a relative dearth of public IMS URL's out there. However, if you look at the questions about IMS in georeference.org and in Manifold-L, it's clear that many people are, indeed, using IMS. A further datum useful to those who want to infer things about Manifold's business (which we do not disclose) is to look at the rather heavy development effort spent on IMS items as shown in release notes from 5.00 onwards. Obviously, we would not be making the investment effort in these areas if it was not a very significant part of our business and represented in thousands of customer wishlist items.

I write at length because it would indeed be helpful to us if we could talk the community into being more open about IMS usage. :-) If anyone has any suggestions how this could be done, I'd be happy to hear them: don't hesitate to write directly to dar@manifold.net

Dimitri,

I am more a GIS person than a programmer, though I have developed several websites with tools such as FrontPage and Expression Web. Being involved in GIS, it is very appealing to be able to develop IMS applications that would help to further expand the use of our geographical data and our application options.

When you read the Manifold IMS manual, you get the impression that all has been set up to make it very easy, which it is with the included template. The problem comes when you try to implement functions or features not available in the Manifold templates, such as a pan tool, limit zoom ins or outs, or maintaining the selection status after zooming in/out.

Then you have to go to the mapserver object model and when you read it, it seems to me that it was developed thinking in the programmer more than on the GIS specialist. It would be very nice that a detailed description on how the different objects and methods should be used to achieve certain effects or performance. An explanation on how the Default.asp, map.asp and table.asp files are related to one another and how they interact. I am sure that for a programmer it may be very easy to find those relations and use them.

Even the programming examples available in the free stuff section (I have downloaded and am giving them a look) seem to be developed also with the programmer in mind as they contain limited explanations on what and how a feature is programmed.

It would be great then, that a detailed manual was made available for the GIS person who is not an expert programmer. I am sure that when the IMS is made friendlier and easier to use for the GIS person, more IMS sites with actual practical applications will be available.

Meanwhile I will keep asking questions and trying to understand how this mapserver objets works.

Thanks for your time.

BiciMapas Mexico GPS Maps & GIS Data www.bicimapas.com.mx

Anajera,

I'm not working for Manifold, but I'm working on training for IMS targeted to GIS person with little programming skills. I was not a programmer when I began working with IMS. This point of view is the one I keep for writing about IMS mechanics. I will write much of it between mid-December and mid-January.

I hope it will be of great help for people who have demand like your.

Vincent

IMS Templates and related services: Dynamic Maps IMS Template #8.3 now available

Vincent

I am aware of what you are doing and am sure several of us will eventually use your material. That said, I still believe that Manifold must do a better job at documenting how to use the mapserver object, considering that not all users are expert programmers but would like to take advantage of this excellent feature.

BiciMapas Mexico GPS Maps & GIS Data www.bicimapas.com.mx

I agree with you. I was really lost the first time I wanted to work with IMS. This forum was really helpful.

IMS Templates and related services: Dynamic Maps IMS Template #8.3 now available

I think Dimitri may have 'undershot' the number of ArcIMS sites in existence , as I can think of about 60 just in New York State alone. Although alot of these are just an out-of-box template. Substantial applications do indeed cost alot of money to put together.

But, I agree with him on why some people don't advertise their Manifold IMS sites. Just this last year, we have built a good number of sites, including:

- an IMS site for the tsunami that received 130,000 hits in two weeks

- an IMS site for hospitals in California for maintainng structural and other earthquake information

- an IMS site for Katrina that is being hit by NSF people and other engineers

- an IMS site for local citizen groups to monitor water quality

- an IMS site that the DEC is using for measuring saturation probability

- and a number of little demonstration sites for local communities...

none of these took much more than a few days to produce, in fact, many only took a few hours. We don't advertise them, simply because I don't want to deal with the bandwidth issues, and sometimes I leave my default_admin.asp hanging around and don't want you Manifold wise-guys to keep refreshing the server . Also, many of these sites are developed for people who know how to use them, and if we made it open to everyone, I would get innundated with emails like "what does the little 'i' button do", and frankly, I'm too busy to deal with that sort of thing (LOL). Because I'm not running it as a business, all the applications mentioned above are on the same server, so we already have enough people hitting it (BTW, its my teaching server too so I don't want to bog it down).

art

Regarding the number of ArcIMS sites: it could certainly be I underestimated, but 60 in New York State is not a whole lot considering the immense population of the state (and, at that I bet that if you sat down and actually tried to list each one you wouldn't get anywhere near 60...). Suppose you actually can count up 60: given that NY is about 10% of the US population that would extrapolate to 600 sites nationwide, which is probably an overshoot given that rural areas are not as high tech centers as urban centers tend to be.

Say that overshoot is compensated by an undershoot because there are many more sites that are unknown... I admit this is a really loose, totally unscientific estimate, but it ends up guesstimating on the order of a thousand or two thousand sites, a remarkably small number.

We've done research on this and we are struck by how few ArcIMS sales result in actually functioning sites, even using only "out of the box" stuff without significant programming. One of the very surprising results was how difficult it was to find a real, functioning ArcIMS site. Given all that I would not be surprised if there are less than 1000 ArcIMS sites that are really functioning on a day-in, day-out basis. But, that's just a guess.

After a slow start this topic is starting to warm up!

Well Dimitri I don't know anything about percentages of ArcIMS sites there are, but my initial query was regarding looking for government IMS sites, my own regional and municipal government bodies (admittedly Canadian) both use ArcIMS. So 100% take up in my neigbourhood!

http://locator.region.waterloo.on.ca/locator.htm

http://kitmaps.city.kitchener.on.ca/onpoint4/onpoint?initializeclient=true

Brian

Dimitri,

Well, there are about 5 or 6 IMS sites in Tompkins County alone. But, I'll have to spend an evening counting some of this up. Whether its 1,000 or 4,000 isn't really the point. You make a pretty good case that it is not in the tens of thousands - at least I don't think so.

But, this also raises another question: say you are wrong, and there are tens of thousands out there, probably 85% of which are just the out-of-the-box shell (85% is a guestimate based on the number of sites I visit and the majority of them just have the out-of-the box template). If that is the case, then there are thousands of people spending $12,000 (or more if they buy ArcGIS) to put some vector maps on an Internet site. I see towns in upstate NY doing this. This raises some serious questions regarding the fleecing of taxpayers, especially if a simple IMS solution can be had for $100 runtime (ok, $245 so I can see what I'm doing ). And this is just the simple stuff. I know of an organization that is using ArcIMS and spending upwards of $200,000 a year in salaries, benefits, etc., to just do the programming - some of this is to support SDE and other things too.

In some ways I think all of us are doing the GIS field a dis-service by not making information about our Manifold IMS sites public. Therefore I decided to set an example, and tomorrow the gismonitor.com should have an article on our Katrina site. It was an interview I did with Matteo. Now, keep in mind, our site is not saving the world, but it is doing some cool stuff for $245. And, as the interview tells, it was done in about 24 hours (with minor modifications afterwards).

art

An example of a IMS made by Manifold:

http://gis.nees.cornell.edu/katrina/default.asp

Regards

Posted By MapasPT on 10/11/2005 5:36 AM

An example of a IMS made by Manifold:

http://gis.nees.cornell.edu/katrina/default.asp

Regards

For clarification, that IMS is custom coded but it does run on the Manfold IMS. Since it is on a Cornell site and it looks very similar to others I've seen from him, this is probably one of Art's.

yep, its one of mine. A couple of interesting things about this one:

1. It was in response to hurricane Katrina

2. The entire thing was built in about 24 hours from scratch (including the data preparation, putting together the imagery, etc..)

3. The damage inventories aren't even loaded on our site. They are stored in a SQLServer database in Buffalo, NY and we are dynamically linking to that database. People in the field send their data collection information (and digital photos) to the Buffalo server, and we just dynamically link to it. We refresh every hour.

4. The gigabytes of imagery are also located on an ERMapper site in Massapequa, NY.

Therefore, this is really a distributed system. We have very little data here at Cornell, and are just grabbing the data from other locations. We are storing all the base information and the queries.

One other cool thing was that I didn't want it on my teaching server, so I was given access to one of the Earthquake servers on the other side of campus. Using a remote access terminal I was able to install Manifold GIS (and the IMS) in a few minutes. That would be much harder to do with other IMS products, believe me.

Because Manifold GIS is the mapserver, putting this together was really easy. Also, using spatial SQL made the creation of queries a snap too.

Here is some more info on what we did:

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Sept05/MississippiGISweb.ws.html

http://www.mceer.buffalo.edu/research/Reconnaissance/Katrina8-28-05/Default.asp

so, don't let anyone tell you Manifold is just a toy. Having this kind of response in 24 hours is pretty good I think.

Hello,

Not sure if I am too late posting to this but we used it in Parkland County (west of Edmonton, AB) to build a quick site locator tool. We threw it together pretty fast but it looks okay and might aid you in your project or future projects. http://gis.parklandcounty.com/achesonweb is the address and it is an industrial area in our municipality.

Mark H

Hello

Another example of Manifold IMS works (this from Portugal):

Enter in http://ims.idt.ipp.pt/ and click on Via Rapida; Angola or Zona Historica do Porto

This IMS its from a Portuguese University.

Regards

Hi!

Sorry guys I am new to Manifold. I've heard and read a lot on Manifold vs ArcGIS/IMS and about the advantages of Manifold in terms of pricing and ease of use. However, my initial experience hasn't been that good. Its very easy to use the export option and create a web site and make it work, but i'm yet to figure out the way to create a .NET web application. The .NET application created by manifold is nothing but and asp disguised as aspx so could not get any clues there either....Programming resources are extremely limited on Manifold and the documentation skeletal...Can you tell me a place to look for a basic working example on ASP.NET (real one using some compiled code). All my efforts to start the server result in a com-exception.

Though I'm quite fed-up of esri products (more like fragments) but need help to migrate. I think Manifold should support the developer community much more if they are targetting serious GIS market.

Thanks

So have you ported the server-side script to code and tried that? The server-side code is pretty simple and you could port the base functionality over in short order. Just focus on the core functionality to instantiate the mapserver object and render.

But start with the base export template and build off of that.

Export to ASP.Net and make sure that works. Avoid all the query, find, view, and other functionality to start with and keep it really simple. Run/Debug to make sure your map file and IIS settings are stabilized so you can rule out those issues with the application.

Then create your codebehind off of one of the .aspx pages and go from there. Try converting map.aspx first.

Can you tell me a place to look for a basic working example on ASP.NET (real one using some compiled code). All my efforts to start the server result in a com-exception.

How about the VisualIMS example by Khalid Pal in the IMS Samples folder on the Resources > Downloads page?

Will Howell

Awe, heck. I fully agree with Dimitri re. some people using sites that they're afraid of others seeing ... and I agree w/ Art re. a diservice in not educating the industry when we can...

We have one up at http://www.welland.ca:8181/gispublic. Please try to keep the laughter to a minimum. The information displayed is "sketchy" at the moment as its more of a beta "placeholder" that I keep testing with. Its probably considered to be "bad form" that I acutally test (and sometimes crash) this technically public site, so I'll try not to for the next while.

We are having some custom work done for us by a third party consultant (who is fully supporting Manifold solutions by the way), and we do have slightly "modified" versions of this public beta (starting to sound like Google here) operating internally within the city. But the public one will give you some idea as to what the internal ones look like.

Niagara Falls (Canada) also has one at http://nfweb.niagarafalls.ca:8081/mims/default.asp and I know Fort Erie (Canada) has an internal one. We also have an IMS that is reading GPS points on a daily basis and is producing reports which has gotten a lot of notice internally.

Cheers.

--------- JBurn

James, I keep getting Access Denied for both sites. Using squid proxy. Could that be a reason? Klaus

Hello James

Fantastic work that one about the Niagara Falls.

Regards

Posted By KlausDE on 11/04/2005 3:36 AM

James, I keep getting Access Denied for both sites. Using squid proxy. Could that be a reason? Klaus

I think that might be. The only time we've had a problem that I'm aware of, it had to do with proxy settings...

--------- JBurn

Great looking sites! Really attractive graphic design.

How are you achieving the rollover text on the Niagara Falls site? Are you using some AJAX techniques? It worked great on my firefox Beta, but errored out on IE!

I believe they built it from the example on the Manifold website. Technically, it does require (at least in IE - FireFox must have a different way of interpreting it) the XML parser.

--------- JBurn

James, thanks for the plug for the NFalls site! I checked out your public IMS and I like what you've done with the layout...nice job!

I am responsible for the Niagara Falls site. If you have problems accessing it you can try: http://map.niagarafalls.ca/

The tool tips are available on the free stuff page, so I incorporated that into the Niagara Falls site. In order for the tool tips to work, you need the latest version of MSXML installed on your system. You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=3144b72b-b4f2-46da-b4b6-c5d7485f2b42&DisplayLang=en

download the msxml.msi file.

I've also incorporated some custom tools in the IMS, but those are for internal use so unfortunately I can't show them.

thanks

ft

The information you have is not what you want. The information you want is not what you need. The information you need is not what you can obtain. The information you can obtain costs more than you want to pay.

Posted By MapasPT on 10/27/2005 12:29 PM

Hello

Another example of Manifold IMS works (this from Portugal):

Enter in http://ims.idt.ipp.pt/ and click on Via Rapida; Angola or Zona Historica do Porto

This IMS its from a Portuguese University.

Regards

Keep in mind that those sites are test sites and not production sites.