The story of SW-Lookup®

Once upon a time...

there was someone who was working for some years with Smallworld®. He had studied supply technology and worked vor many years as a developer in this area. Therefore, he knew other software environments than Smallworld® quite well.

Since he did larger developments before and had also provided client support, he could not understand why accessing the valuable data in Smallworld® was so unnecessary difficult.

He only knew about a strange system called Smallworld view which was cumbersome.

So the idea arose to get additional value from the GIS by developing a component which would:

• Be quite simple to install, even for the end user.
• Provide access to the GIS via Intranet like a kind of search engine, with full-text indexing
• Created simple HTML which could run on all kinds of browsers available at that time.

After about a year of development work the goal had been achieved, and he went to inernational Smallworld User's conference in Paris with great plans to promote his pretty new system to the public...

But Murphy's law says, ...

... if anything can go wrong, it will.

Because now, Smallworld woke up and issued SIAS, complicated and far more expensive and by that time not really much better, but from GE.

For a small company like friendlyGIS® this closed nearly all doors to the end users, and nearly every Smallworld® partner released its own SIAS client.

Despite the fact that I have seen coming and going much larger comanies in the years since then, SW-Lookup® did no longer have a real chance - nobody would buy the product from a one-man-company.

So, after the realease of GIS 4, after the last clients had vanished, the development of SW-Lookup® has been stopped.

Bad luck, but ...

... every cloud has a silver lining! Due to the experience made with developing SW-Lookup® I created a bunch of basic knowlegde which has become an important part of the base of my work sinde then.

In the years since then, numerous clients have profited from this knowldge and friendlyGIS® hase become a kind of trademark (by the way, it is a registered trademark).