Abstract:
Thuban is an interactive geographic data viewer. It has been developed because
there was no simple interactive viewer for geographic information available as
Free Software. Thuban is written in Python and C++ and uses the wxWindows
library allowing it to run on many different platforms, including GNU/Linux and
Windows.
Geographic data viewers are a necessary
... tool as they allow one to get a visual
impression of the positional relationship of the information that may not be
apparent from simple inspection of the data values themselves. Thuban allows
the user to create a session that displays geographic data and then explore
that data through navigation and manipulation of how it is drawn. The results
can then be saved or printed.
Thuban arranges a session in a hierarchy. A session contains a map which
consists of layers. Each layer represents one kind of data set. For instance,
there may be a layer for roads and another layer for buildings. These layers
can either be vector shapes or images. 
