SICAD Spatial Desktop

From MapbenderWiki

SICAD Spatial Desktop was the GIS desktop software of SICAD Geomatics, up until 2002 a wholly owned subsidiary of SIEMENS.

Development History

The roots of this software have been implemented around 1990 and were developed at the Geography Department of the University of Marburg. CATLAS (Computer Atlas) was one of the first full fledged PC-based (Microsoft DOS) GIS packages with high performance raster ananlysis capacities, comprehensive vector digitizing functionality, complex data formats and plot modules. The copyrights for the code was owned by the company Nixdorf Computers.

With the fusion of SIEMENS and Nixdorf two previously competing GIS software packages found themselves to be developed under one roof. The SIEMENS customer base being larger and the software more expensive (running on SIEMENS BS2000 operating systems onyl) SICAD won out.

But as the SICAD product range did not include a PC-based GIS package this gap was filled by reducing the functionality of CATLAS and porting it to the Microsoft Windows operating simulation. The name changed to WinCAT.

During the 90's WinCAT had to be renamed to SICAD Spatial Desktop because of the claims by another company with a product namend WinCAD.

In 1998 CCGIS implemented a web map service using the API of SICAD Spatial Desktop. In the following year SICAD Geomatics blocked the API function which rendered images for the standard license and started to sell the WMS extension as a separate product called SICAD/SD-IMS. CCGIS became the maintainer of SICAD/SD-IMS until it was discontinued at the end of 2002 due to SICAD Geomatics being sold to AED Graphics and subsequent migration of all software to ESRI core technology.

We hope that the SICAD Spatial Desktop software will rest in peace.