I'm
trying to remember how many years ago it was that I first heard the
vision of Web services for GIS. I suspect it was in the mid/late 1990s.
The big Web service on everyone's list? Geocoding, also known as
“locationally enabling datasets.”
With MapInfo Professional v8.5, that vision is reality.

Moshe Binyamin, senior product manager, gave me the tour, just as the product was announced for release
on June 6 of this year. In this release MapInfo laid the groundwork for
the
desktop product to interact with Web services of many kinds, including
SOAP and XML (thus RSS). This core technology allows developers to
connect MapInfo Pro to existing Web services “with a really minor
development effort that utilizes XML” per Binyamin.

The first example shown was a connection to Salesforce.com,
an online customer relationship management
service. MapInfo developers created a sample application using MapBasic
that, once loaded, allows users to access data records from a Salesforce.com
account and place customer locations on the map. Alternatively, the
user can directly link back and display full record information in the Salesforce.com app by clicking on the map.

A
second example illustrated pulling in Yahoo traffic (via an RSS feed)
to a MapInfo map. Yahoo uses its own XML format for this data which
MapInfo had to “decipher” to make the application work. Most feeds,
Binyamin suggested, would need some sort of custom parsing to be fully
useful. The MapInfo tool automatically pulled the central ZIP Code from
the existing
map, allowed for a magnification level (10 mile radius or more) and the
ability to select traffic data based on severity. This tool and its
source code will be included as one of the sample applications that
will ship with MapBasic v8.5.…'' Read more