When I saw this post at the WeoGeo blog on Voyager, I was psyched. The free version of Voyager searches your hard drives for up to 5000 geodata files, catalogs/indexes them, thumbnails them, and makes them easily searchable and retrievable; paid versions increase that data limit, and offer more features (concurrent users, network storage searches, etc.). You can even add links to online data sources like WeoGeo that support the Web Catalog Service (CSW) (live web demo here).
I’ve got data files scattered all over the place, so this would be a perfect organization tool for me. But I was bummed to find out that you need to have ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop 9.3 or higher installed on your system, which I don’t. Nuts. But if you do have a supported version of ArcGIS, you’d be crazy not to at least try out the free version.
hey thanks for checking out Voyager. The ArcGIS prerequisite is a sort of artificial limitation in our configuration wizard. Voyager supports a wide variety of formats using open apis but requires arcobjects to read certain esri proprietary formats (.MDX, geodatabase etc).
there are ways to skip the wizard and use voyager in non-esri configurations. An upcoming release will make this an optional check.
if you’d like more information just let us know..
brian at voyagergis.com
Thanks for the info, Brian. Please let me know when the Voyager version that doesn’t require ESRI comes out.