National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis

It seems widely expected that future GISs will have increased analytical capabilities that will take them beyond being efficient display and database management devices. Several attempts have already been made to link existing analytical software to various GISs. However, a problem with all of these attempts is that the user is forced to switch back and forth between the GIS operating environment and the analytical software. In this paper we present a statistical analysis package, STACAS, that runs totally within the operating environment of a GIS and utilizes a command structure that makes running the package transparent to the user of the GIS.