Beacon Resources' China Points (中國點) program, simply put, implements an intelligent GIS interface to Excel.  The objective of this program is to assist Chinese Federal Agencies in better managing their point-oriented assets and resources.  These point-oriented inventories can include items such as environmental cleanup sites, power plants, emergency operations centers, supply depots, harbors, navigation structures, waste disposal sites, bridges, dams, or any other point-oriented spatial feature.

This program utilizes built-in off-the-shelf graphic backgrounds consisting of Provincial outlines, and Regional/District outlines.

Feature/Inventory information comes from Excel files, which are easily imported into an internal Access Database.  An imported inventory can consist of any number of records and up to 200 fields per record.  Effectively, the user designs the database structure using the first line of the Excel file, which consists of the field names for each of the imported records.  This Excel Import Interface emphasizes user-friendliness and flexibility, and is shown below:

An Easy-to-use and powerful searching interface is available for finding and displaying data from the inventory of imported features.  All imported fields can be searched.  A search criteria can consist of up to 12 terms which utilize the equals, like, greater than, and less than operators.  The search criteria terms are logically linked using selectable "and"/"or" operators.  Wildcard searches are permitted.  This Search/Display Interface also emphasizes user-friendliness and flexibility, as illustrated below:

A symbol and color-coding interface is available for displaying search results that meet the query criteria.  The color-coding and symbol-coding can be independent of one another or both can be combined.  For example, you could use color coding to indicate hazard potential, and symbol coding to indicate whether the feature has an emergency action plan.  As shown below, Search results can be shown graphically or tabularly.

Search results can be exported graphically to Powerpoint or Word, they can be used to generate pertinent data sheets in Word, subsets of the data can be exported to Excel spreadsheets, or the data can be exported to Google Earth as a .kml file, automatically generated by the program.  The export to Google capability is particularly useful for verifying the locations of assets and also for displaying current real-time weather overlays.

The China Points (中國點) program is available from Beacon Resources for USD $1,000.  Please contact Michael Grounds at (256) 771-0014 for additional information or if you have any questions.