The software team made the program flexible enough to be used not just for roads and rivers, but almost any kind of spatial data: provincial boundaries, power-station locations, satellite images, and so on.

The program was named JUMP (JAVA Unified Mapping Platform), and it has become a popular, free Geographic Information System (GIS).

A number of the lead members from each team working with JUMP formed the JPP Development Committee, whose purpose was to guide and oversee this new unified platform.

It is a way to describe spatial information in a human readable form, and is an accepted "open standard" for GIS data.

While OpenJUMP is considered primarily a vector based GIS, it also supports rasters, as TIF files or the above ESRI ASCII grid.