When the U.S. congressional districts are redefined in the year 2000, a GIS-based demographics and economics system being developed in Boulder might prove the winning ticket for politicians wishing to hand pick their constituents. GIS, geographic information systems allow users to collect, analyze, and display large volumes of spatial data. SRC, a micromarketing firm in Boulder, is developing software that accesses Internet databases to forecast the voting characteristics of households within a geographic region. Another SRC application is already helping to meet the advertising and business development needs of Thomson Newspapers , third-largest newspaper owner in Canada and the U.S. Thomson owns 68 daily papers with a combined circulation of 1.9 million. An intranet is a computer network based on Internet technology that is designed to serve the internal requirements of a single company.
Users can access internal resources using Web browsers, newsreaders, and e-mail.
Thomson's corporate databases reside on a server at SRC in Boulder. Its employees query the server, as well as external databases, using Netscape on the Web. They receive map and report information quickly and inexpensively. Non-technical employees can create presentations in minutes, and the interactive maps allow the user to customize the displays. The system also produces in-depth market analyses.