GIS once meant thousands of dollars worth of workstations and applications, time-consuming data collection, and painstaking map drafting. Unless you're calculating detailed analyses, simple packages will be adequate to your needs. Be creative in finding the software, data sets and maps that will do the job with a minimum of fuss and expense. Work the Web, a treasure trove of free and useful stuff. You will be surprised at how much you can do with so little.
Users start with a basic, unlabled shape.
They then select from a list of about 150 layers depicting political, topographic, demographic and geographic information. Because the information resides on individual layers, it's easy to delete information from a finished map. Users can display maps created with the Hot Spot Maps digital library in 36 different projections. Federal users include various Pentagon offices, said Rick Wood, Magellan vice president. All rights reserved.