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On the other hand, if they are able to fulfill such requirements, they 
can even go further and extend their business in applications such as Land 
Information Systems, utility mapping, etc. 
Geographic information systems demand more powerful, flexible and complete 
solutions. À few of these requirements are: 
- product-independent databases supporting several different applications 
oriented towards manipulation and analysis of information, and not pri- 
marily towards simple graphic output 
- easy extraction and updating of attribute and spatial information 
- strong and proven, topologically consistent data model, but flexible 
enough to add new applications and requirements 
- optimisation and combination of methods of data capture from different 
sources (aerial photographs, field-survey methods, existing maps, etc) 
- documentation of data sources and accuracies 
- elimination of the "storage by map-sheet" concept 
THE SYSTEM 9 APPROACH IN GENERAL 
Wild Heerbrugg began the development of a new product family, SYSTEM 9, in 
1984, to bridge this gap between existing data-capture solutions and 
information-system requirements. 
SYSTEM 9 is a geographic information system with optimised and fully inte- 
grated data-capture procedures for applications such as topographic map- 
ping, land-records management and infrastructure and utility tasks. Various 
different stand-alone workstations based on powerful 32-bit microcomputers 
and high-performance graphics hardware and software allow flexible data 
capture from aerial photographs, field-survey measurements or existing 
maps. Advanced possibilities of the latest hardware and software develop- 
ment are integrated in the system, e.g.: 
- UNIX * 4.2 BSD operating system 
- GKS graphic kernel system, level 2.c 
- Relational Database Management System 
- Network File System NFS* 
- Ethernet * Network with IP/TCP protocoll 
- High-resolution mono and colour-raster CRTs supporting 
multiple-window technology 
The SYSTEM 9 family of workstations consists of four main types of work- 
station, each designed to suit a particular facet of the tasks involved 
in capturing, storing and managing geographic and attribute data: 
- S9-D : Digitising station to digitise or update existing maps 
- S9-E : High-performance edit station 
- S9-AP: Analytical plotter station for photogrammetric data capture and 
editing 
- S9-S : File-server station connected to the Ethernet 
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