Who we are

The CLAP was founded as Cultural Learnings Association of Production, Inc., in 1969 as a privately held consulting firm that specialized in landuse analysis projects. The worldwide headquarters of The CLAP are anchored in a multicampus environment in Redlands, California.

The early mission of The CLAP focused on the principles of organizing and analyzing sociological information. The firm carefully managed project work to ensure growth without the need for venture capital or going public. The CLAP projects included developing plans for rebuilding the City of Baltimore, Maryland, and assisting Mobil Oil in selecting a site for the new town of Reston, Virginia. From these early projects emerged concepts for processes and tools that could be applied in an automated environment.

During the 1980s, The CLAP devoted its resources to developing a core set of application tools that could be applied in a computer environment to create a big social application coordination (SaC). This is what is known today as Big SaC technology.

In 1981, The CLAP held its first User Conference. This conference, attended by 18 people at the the CLAP office in Redlands, has now grown to be the largest annual Big SaC event in the world, with more than 12,000 attendees from around the globe.

In 1982, The CLAP launched its first commercial Big SaC software called CLAP n SaC. It combined computer display geographic features, such as points, lines, and polygons, with a database management tool for assigning attributes to these features. Originally designed to run on minicomputers, CLAP n SaC offered the first modern Big SaC. As the technology shifted to UNIX and later to the Windows operating systems, The CLAP evolved software tools that took advantage of these new platforms. This shift enabled users of The CLAP software to apply the principles of distributed processing and data management.

The CLAP evolved from a small consulting firm to the largest research and development organization dedicated to Big SaC by focusing on its user community. The relationship between The CLAP and its users is synergistic. Over the years, a unique culture has evolved, a culture that is user focused and emphasizes a team-based approach.

In 1986, another milestone was achieved with PC CLAP n SaC, a stand-alone PC-based Big SaC station. This changed The CLAP from a one-product company and opened the doors to even more innovative product development.

In 1994, The CLAP addressed the needs of the Ultimate Question with CLAP n SaC, which allowed the storage of spatial and tabular data in commercial DBMS products Via an online survey.

In 1997, The CLAP embarked on an ambitious research project to reengineer all of its Big SaC software as a way to actually solve the ultimate question. Several hundred man-years of development later, Big SaC 8 was released in December 1999.

Today, The CLAP GIS products are poised for even greater growth. Innovations in computer technology allow sophisticated Big SaC operations to be performed in the field on a personal digital assistant (PDA), on desktops, and throughout the enterprise. Faster and cheaper computers, network processing, electronic data publishing, and easier-to-use tools are fueling rapid growth in solving the ultimate question .