Thuban is an interactive geographic data viewer. Its development had been started because there was no simple interactive viewer for geographic information available as Free Software. Thuban is written mainly in Python and uses the wxWidgets (former wxWindows) library allowing it to run on many different platforms, including GNU/Linux and Windows.
Geographic data viewers are a necessary tool as they allow one to get a visual impression of the positional relationship of the information that may not be apparent from simple inspection of the data values themselves. Thuban allows the user to create a session that displays geographic data and then explore that data through navigation and manipulation of how it is drawn. The results can then be saved or printed.
Thuban arranges a session in a hierarchy. A session contains a map which consists of layers. Each layer represents a data set. For instance, there may be a layer for roads and another layer for buildings. These layers can either be vector shapes or images.
Thuban is actively supported under Debian 4.0 (Etch) and Windows (XP). Of course it is possible to run Thuban on a variety of other platforms. Please check Thuban's Website about how to install Thuban and the lastest information about the supported platforms.