Convinced?

And are you convinced of what Flowmap can do for you? Go to the downloadpage and try it out yourself.

map windroos

hospitals in Bushbuckridge

Why use Flowmap

Most general purpose GIS packages are primarily designed for the management and display of spatially referenced date. In other words, data relating to a single location in space, be it a point, a line or a polygon. These packages usually have also some analytical capabilities. Think of things like polygon overlay, buffer analysis or raster-based map-algebra functions.

However, they do not have tools for the management or analysis of data that relate to pairs of locations. These data describe spatial relations, such as distances and flows.

Fortunately, Flowmap fills this gap. In fact, Flowmap was specifically designed to handle:

In the map below, for example, Flowmap has been used to calculate what the most optimal locations would be for the placement of a new hospital in the region Maruleng, South-Africa. Making use of population densities in these area, a so-called Catchment Area Analysis was executed. Hereby the locations where hospital services were least optimal were found.

Note: although the locations have been calculated within Flowmap, the map has been created with ArcMap

hospitals in Maruleng

Flowmap facts:

Flowmap analyses

Furthermore, it is important to note that Flowmap comes in two flavours: the Educational edition and the Professional edition. The Professional edition has more features, however, the Educational editions does not cost anything. Actually, there is just one edition: if you download and install the Educational Edition, you also have the Professional Edition, but the additional features of the Professional Edition need to be activated by entering a registration code. As you might wonder what the extra functionality of the Professional release include:

For more information concerning the Professional edition of Flowmap, please look at the manual which can be found at the downloadpage!

Please note: Flowmap is not a general purpose GIS. In fact, apart from the above mentioned spatial analysis tools, its functionalities are rather basic. It is specifically designed to be used in combination with a Database Managment System (DMBS) and a mapping system and/or general purpose GIS.