Golden Software Blog

Golden Software customers possess a broad assortment of backgrounds from earth sciences and engineering to education and politics. This vast background results in a variety of uses for Golden Software's products. Each customer uses the software in a unique way, and we are pleased to share these stories. This blog article features Dr. Eric Delmelle, a professor of GIS and Health Geography in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina, and his use of Voxler, among other applications, to visualize space-time patterns of human behaviors and human health issues.

Dr. Delmelle's research focuses on answering fundamental epidemiological questions where spatial and spatiotemporal methodology is a critical avenue for analysis. He uses robust geocomputational methodologies that "deepen our understanding on the dynamics of infectious and non-infectious diseases". Dr. Delmelle is dedicated to the development of new visualization techniques that detect space-time patterns at different scales and leverage state of the art computational techniques to generate predictive models that could ultimately have influence on health decisions in the public sector.

In the coming weeks, I'll be introducing some of the new features in Surfer 13. The first feature discussed in this series is the addition of graticules!

A graticule is a network of lines representing the Earth's parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude. While a graticule represents lines or latitude and longitude, a map-grid represents lines in other units, such as meters or feet. A graticule or map-grid can be added to a map by selecting the map and clicking the Map | Add | Graticule command. Graticules and map-grids are a great way to add more context to your maps. Display your axes in the units of your data (feet, meters, etc.), and add a graticule to show latitude and longitude values too! Do your clients need a map displayed in multiple units? Project your map in UTM meters, but display a grid in feet!