Caliper Corporation was founded in 1983 as a developer of mapping software and is headquartered in

Newton, Massachusetts Newton is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is approximately west of downtown Boston. Newton resembles a patchwork of thirteen villages, without a city center. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population of Ne ...

. Caliper develops

geographic information system A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing Geographic data and information, geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with Geographic information system software, sof ...

s (GIS) and

transportation Transport (in British English), or transportation (in American English), is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Modes of transport include air, land (rail and road), water, cable, pipeline, ...

software. Caliper is also a consulting and R&D provider offering professional services in quantitative

management consulting Management consulting is the practice of providing consulting services to organizations to improve their performance or in any way to assist in achieving organizational objectives. Organizations may draw upon the services of management consultant ...

, transportation, and decision support systems development. Caliper is the developer of the ''TransCAD'' transportation planning software,

TransModeler TransModeler is the name of a based traffic simulation platform for doing wide-area traffic planning, traffic management, and emergency evacuation studies that is developed by Caliper Corporation. It can animate the behavior of multi-modal tr ...

traffic simulation Traffic simulation or the simulation of transportation systems is the computer simulation, mathematical modeling of transportation systems (e.g., freeway junctions, arterial routes, roundabouts, downtown grid systems, etc.) through the application o ...

software, and

Maptitude Maptitude is a mapping software program created by Caliper Corporation that allows users to view, edit and integrate maps. The software and technology are designed to facilitate the geographical visualization and analysis of either included dat ...

GIS packages.

TransCAD

''TransCAD'' is software for transportation planning. In addition to the standard point, line, area, and image layers in a GIS map, TransCAD supports route system layers and has tools for creating, manipulating and displaying routes. TransCAD uses a network data structure to support

routing Routing is the process of selecting a path for traffic in a network or between or across multiple networks. Broadly, routing is performed in many types of networks, including circuit-switched networks, such as the public switched telephone netw ...

and network optimization models. TransCAD includes trip generation, distribution, mode choice, and traffic assignment models that support

transportation planning Transportation planning is the process of defining future policies, goals, investments, and spatial planning designs to prepare for future needs to move people and goods to destinations. As practiced today, it is a collaborative process that i ...

and travel demand forecasting. TransCAD has a set of dynamic segmentation and

linear referencing Linear referencing, also called linear reference system or linear referencing system (LRS), is a method of spatial referencing in engineering and construction, in which the locations of physical features along a linear element are described in te ...

tools for managing

highway A highway is any public or private road or other public way on land. It is used for major roads, but also includes other public roads and public tracks. In some areas of the United States, it is used as an equivalent term to controlled-access ...

rail Rail or rails may refer to: Rail transport *Rail transport and related matters *Rail (rail transport) or railway lines, the running surface of a railway Arts and media Film * ''Rails'' (film), a 1929 Italian film by Mario Camerini * ''Rail'' ( ...

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

, and other

networks Network, networking and networked may refer to: Science and technology * Network theory, the study of graphs as a representation of relations between discrete objects * Network science, an academic field that studies complex networks Mathematics ...

Product history

TransCAD was first released as a

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...

-based transportation GIS package in 1985. TransCAD 3.0, the first

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

version, was released on May 28, 1996. TransCAD 4.8 was replaced by TransCAD 5.0 on January 2, 2008, and later TransCAD 6.0 and TransCAD 7.0. The most current version is TransCAD 8.0.

Web-based version

''TransCAD for the Web'' is a web-based version of TransCAD that uses application source code that can be edited using Javascript, HTML, and ASP.NET. Application templates (Mapplications) are used to create a web application or service. The default templates include

Ajax Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

applications and mashups that use

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panoramic views of streets ( Street View), real-time traffic conditions, and rou ...

via the Google Map API. TransCAD for the Web was the first web-based GIS for Transportation (GIS-T), and remains the only transportation GIS with web development capabilities.TransCAD for the Web Overview
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Maptitude

By 2001, Caliper's new software mapping technology was being used by over fifty percent of the United States's legislatures to draft new electoral district boundaries following the 1999 census. By 2016, Maptitude was "fully loaded with just about every census information, with economic information, with every precinct-by-precinct results of elections all the way down ballot going back for years."

References

External links

Official Mapping Software Website
{{Authority control GIS software companies GIS software Software companies based in Massachusetts Traffic simulation Software companies of the United States Companies based in Massachusetts 1983 establishments in Massachusetts