Open Source Geographic Information Systems

RGillig writes "The second MapServer Users Meeting and the first ever Open Source GIS Conference was held on June 9th to 11th in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. The initial response from the Open Source GIS community is that the conference was a huge success. It was great to have people from private, government, academia, and communities all together discussing how Open Source GIS applies to their needs. Here is a presentation given by Paul Ramsey, Director, Refractions Research Inc. that outlines the current state-of-the-art for Open Source GIS, and includes links and information about all of the current software packages/efforts, etc."

Comments

Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[toetagger1]

Isn't it ironic that they have to specify that Ottowa and Ontario is in Canada, when the whole article talks about maps?

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[xs650]

They realized that many of their geographically challanged friends from south of the border would read the report.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[0racle]

I know, its so strange, its not like there's any other Ottawa or Ontario anywhere else in the world. Yep, only ones are in Canada, and while were at it only Americans don't know geography. Any other cliches you want to throw in?

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[RollingThunder]

It does happen to be our nation's capital. That would tend to make it the default assumption for large meetings like this, rather than smaller places like you mention.

If I say "there's going to be a major convention in London", I would assume London, England - not London, Ontario, Canada - and expect others to assume the same.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[0racle]

Never assume anything. A large portion of the Canadian population doesn't know that Ottawa is the capital, Toronto is the first choice of many. Canadians don' know any more about geography then anyone else.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Jardine]

A large portion of the Canadian population doesn't know that Ottawa is the capital, Toronto is the first choice of many.

You seem to have misspelled American. Do you have a source for this statistic?

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[0racle]

Only personal experience from Social Studies every year in school. I would do a study myself, but it would be restricted to people around here.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[whiteranger99x]

Well there IS a City of Ontario in California, USA

Granted while it a little out of scope, it indeed proves that there IS another Ontario anywhere else in the world :)

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

The source is that you are infact a Canadian and getting defensive when the topic is brought up.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would tend to make it the default assumption for large meetings like this, rather than smaller places like you mention.

You know what they say about assuming... dont ever assume! It will make an ASS out of U & ME.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spoken like true french canadian scum.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[RayBlume]

Hahahahahahaha you bonzied idiotosa! What planet you say U were frum?

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[coaxial]

Isn't it ironic that they have to specify that Ottowa and Ontario is in Canada, when the whole article talks about maps?

No. It's not.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, like where is Washington? Uhh, I think the capital is Spokane or something...

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[JPriest]

True though, try asking some random person how many states are in Canada some time. The answers will amuse you. For some other easy questions people seem to miss see: About how long does it take for Earth to orbit the sun? How often do we have a leap year? I think MSNBC did a survey with simmilar questions, I was shocked by the results.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Long curious about the origin of this phrase, I did a google search after reading your post. I came across the story of the p-p-p-powerbook and man, that was some funny shit. Thanks for posting your lame-ass leetspeek.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Another good one is: Who is the vice president of the United States. You could stand outsite a grocery store all day asking people questions like that and not find more than maybe 3 of them that could answer 5 of them correctly. Amazingly enough, they still let these people register to vote.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[some guy I know]

I would assume London, England - not London, Ontario, Canada

Right, like I live near Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
When most people refer to Atlanta, they don't mean Atlanta, New York, USA, which is a tiny village near Naples (that's Naples, New York, USA, not Naples, Italy).

OTOH, "Georgia" is ambiguous enough that you sometimes have to say "Georgia, USA" or "the country Georgia" (or "Georgia, Asia") to distinguish them, at least if you live outside the USA.
(Inside the USA, most people don't even know that there is a country named Georgia.)

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, we're all ignorant of world geography here in the US... yuk yuk!

Moronic assumptions and asshats, what's with them?

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from a bunch of foreigners?

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Registered Coward v2]

If I say "there's going to be a major convention in London", I would assume London, England - not London, Ontario, Canada - and expect others to assume the same.

That depends on your location - having lived in Ohio and Georgia (US, not as in Stalin), someone saying they are going to hold a meeting in London or Rome repectfully would not necessarily immediately mean a flight across the pond.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[xs650]

" True though, try asking some random person how many states are in Canada some time."

The only one I can think of off hand is North Dakota.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[failedlogic]

As a Carelton University student, posters advertising the event were all throughout the Loeb building where the Geography department is located.

As a non-geography student, I saw the banners all the time. I don't think it was advertised outside of the University.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[vsprintf]

Granted while it a little out of scope, it indeed proves that there IS another Ontario anywhere else in the world :)

Really, it's not out of scope either. Ontario International Airport is in California not Canada. If you say Ontario in California, at least twenty million people won't be thinking about Canada.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[whereiswaldo]

If you hear someone from Atlanta, Georgia talking about Georgia, you will immediately know what they are talking about because of their very distinct accent.

Re:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Not even funny.

I tried to go to that

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't find the damn place though.

open source GIS

[Anonymous Coward]

So when is GIS going to be tied into the internet so when I search for a pizza joint the first result won't be a place that's 300 miles away?

Re:open source GIS

[LostCluster]

I'd suggest sailing your ship a little closer to the coastline first... there aren't very many places that deliver pizza to ships in international waters 285 miles away from the nearest land mass. :)

Re:open source GIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you not tried local.google.com?

[Or yahoo's yellow pages, for that matter.]

Re:open source GIS

[kelk1]

That is actually a good question, but difficult to implement. Google is getting closer with that local thing. I also read that some people were taking pictures of the streets and geo-reference them (forgot where). You could virtually check how a street or a whole town looks like.

Area 51

[Anonymous Coward]

This place does not exist. The US government will send in the Feds and CIA to bust you if you print this on your map!

It happened when?

[rikkards]

I live in Ottawa and never heard about it. Hmm. Maybe it was due to the fact that the two big summer events that anyone talked about here were the Hope beach volleyball tournament (today) and Bluesfest (which started yesterday).

Re:It happened when?

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot about the annual ribfest. Probably the best in North America. Also, watching the Senators lose to the Maple Leafs every year in the Stanley Cup playoffs is also great!!!

Re:It happened when?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing stupider than yankees talking about ribs and blues,
is Canadians talking about ribs and blues.

Re:It happened when?

[rikkards]

I knew I forgot something (the ribs).I was out of town for that but yeah that is definitely an attraction every year.

opensource GIS predates Linux...

[prof_peabody]

Many of you may have forgotten that GMT (generic mapping tool) is open source and predates linux. I'm glad to see more opensource work in the GIS field, as many companies charge bundles of cash for very basic GIS software.

Re:opensource GIS predates Linux...

[Anne Thwacks]

I think you will find that GMT stands for Greenwich Mean Time.

Re:opensource GIS predates Linux...

[Anonymous Coward]

Type "GMT" in google

The GMT Home Page is #1.

World Time = Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) - Current Time in every ... is # 2.

I think you will find, however, that in common technical usage, at least in the states, "Universial Time" is prefered to "Greenwich Mean Time" anyway. Less anglo centric.

GMT means Generic Mapping Tools.

Re:opensource GIS predates Linux...

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

I'd love to find a cheap/free alternative to ESRI. Their stuff is generally pretty good, but God forbid that you have a nasty bug in a feature that few people use but you. It'll never get fixed. This way, I could fix it myself!

(I'm still hot about how if you use tags in their text boxes, full justification fails and reverts to left. We make professional maps, and that is not acceptable for our text blocks. I had to rig it so that it prints out a separate box for every line and I tweak the word spacing so that it is the right length. The processing required eats up some decent time).

I would also like to be able to design some of my own free software at home using GIS. I could redesign my mother-in-law's customer geodatabase to query artists, customers by distances from their shop, art shows, customer or artist location, etc. Or maybe an address book, and set it up so that you could enter a meeting/get-together with a location and it gives driving distances for everybody concerned, etc. ESRI licenses cost thousands of dollars....

This is good stuff

[goatstuffer]

Outside of the end-user type applications (ESRI's ArcGIS and co.), open source in GIS is quite widespread.

Refractions Research maintains the PostGIS module for PostgreSQL, and while it is not yet complete (fix the ACROSS function guys!) it certainly makes the wrangling of data much easier as it implements the OpenGIS SQL specification.

Compare this to the old days of a dozen different formats which weren't convertable, it's much nicer with GML (Geographic Markup Language) and standard representations of geographic features made possible by the find folks involved in the OpenGIS consortium.

Props to the team at the University of Minnesota for MapServer, it's made my life a whole lot easier.

Re:This is good stuff

[temojen]

Indeed. I was glad to read of JUMP in this report because I was looking for something along the lines of ARCView for occasional use and had been very frustrated with GRASS. GRASS may be extremely powerful and flexible for geographers etc, but for occasional analysis (by non-experts) it really sucks. JUMP looks to be just the ticket.

I guess I'll know a little while once the download completes.

Re:This is good stuff

[Jon_Aquino]

I'm on the JUMP development team and I hope it meets your needs. It's a good program for editing 10MB shapefiles. It can also edit GML, though not as easily. And it has a simple Java plugin system, so you can make it understand any data format (or database) (or do anything for that matter).

Feel free to contact me or to sign up on the mailing list for the JUMP Unified Mapping Platform.

Re:This is good stuff

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

Is there a good place to go to find programs (.NET or Java) written to use JUMP's libraries? Preferably with MS Access, since I know my computer can create those pretty easily.

I will keep exploring your website, but I had never heard of you until today (though I've been curious).

Links to JUMP and others at freegis.org.

Danger, Will Robinson!

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't try to use MapServer unless you have a dedicated system on which you can have a modified PHP, modified PostgreSQL, and modified Apache. Probably other things.

Texas Mesonet

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a lot of work with MapServer and GIS data at Texas A&M for a part-time job I had my last semester (this has been close to 2 years ago now). Check out the Texas Mesonet project at:

http://mesonet.tamu.edu/

Click on Current Weather to see the MapServer-based map I helped create initially. It's all built with open-source software and (I think) freely available data from the national weather service. It's amazing how much data you get, and how easily it can be handled by one little machine in a windowless office somewhere (until it's slashdotted of course).

doc file?

[shaitand]

Anyone else have a clue why information about an open source anything would be in a proprietary MS format?

Re:doc file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because open source anything doesn't imply open source everything so don't assume that it does.

Re:doc file?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you complaining about? open office reads docs just fine.

Re:doc file?

[shaitand]

"The State of Open Source GIS"

Gee and here I thought this headline (of the document) indicated this document was ENTIRELY about OSS.

Re:doc file?

[shaitand]

That's hardly the point is it?

It's not exactly much of an endorsement for OSS if you use proprietary formats to distribute that endorsement.

I really wish people would stop pretending that simply because openoffice reads docs is some valid justification for using the format. For one, there is nothing you can put in a doc you can't put in an open format, and most of what is put in a doc should be put in an rtf or txt file.

For another, there is no guarantee MS won't change the doc format tomorrow, which is the entire point of NOT using their formats.

Re:doc file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good grief, quit your idiotic whining. It's a format tons of people choose just to get it to a widespread audience with a minimum of hassle.

Ideological fanatics irritate the hell out of me, they just can't help but read volumes into meaningless trivia...

Re:doc file?

[nostriluu]

I have to generally agree with you, it's not like it would be a big deal for the author to save it in a format that would be accessible to anyone.

But the author doesn't get open source at all anyway, glossing over the meaning of the license program and just focusing on popularity. The author would put Apache in the same class as the demo version of ACDSee with that point of view.

Re:doc file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source No profit for developers

Re:doc file?

[Anonymous Coward]

Open Source <> No profit for developers.<br>
(Previewing is a good idea.)

Re:doc file?

[nostriluu]

Yes Mr. Gates, not many are likely to get rich rich rich developing open source software, but there are other reasons for living.

Re:doc file?

[shaitand]

Actually Mr. Gates, open source means no profit for big software houses like Microsoft.

MOST programmers work inhouse or for custom development firms which can make as much or more money by using open source software (reduction in development time, cuts expenses licensing 3rd party libraries, the don't have to pay MS for information about API's etc, in many cases others will do most of the work to maintain the project).

Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[isdnip]

The "briefing" has a good collection of pointers to open-source applications out there. But as a fan of the commercial Windows GIS product MapInfo, I am frustrated by the lack of an open source alternative, and by the lack of comparable tools for Linux. GRASS is pretty powerful, but it's not something anybody can just start using; it's more like something a Unix GIS professional (difficult but powerful systems like ESRIs) would find interesting.

This note from the briefing is most telling:

Note: The saturated commercial market for cartography tools, the high level of effort to achieve a usable tools, and the appeal of other cutting edge projects have combined to deter any active development on user-friendly paper map production tools. As with the OpenOffice experience in Linux, it would probably require a dedicated multi-year funded project to produce a core product with sufficient technical mass that an open source community could reasonably continue with enhancements and support.

In other words, don't expect to find a complete open source end-user application within your lifetime.

This is, alas, common in the open source world. Everybody does their own toolkit that does 90% of what other toolkits do, adds 10% of its own, and assumes that the user is a person who gets their jollies from writing code, not actually using the application with production data.

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[Frank Warmerdam]

> In other words, don't expect to find a complete
> open source end-user application within your
> lifetime.

The comment you quoted addresses the specific topic of cartographic map generation suitable for printing. I don't see any reason that several of the existing projects can't include respectible map production suitable for most GIS end users.

Furthermore, as noted, a serious cartographic production system could be implemented within a couple of years given an appropriate project to drive it.

> This is, alas, common in the open source world.
> Everybody does their own toolkit that does 90%
> of what other toolkits do, adds 10% of its own,
> and assumes that the user is a person who gets
> their jollies from writing code, not actually
> using the application with production data.

Frankly, the report indicates that there is a great deal of sharing of supporting toolkits between the end user applications of various kinds. I think the open source world is much less to duplication of effort than the proprietary software world.

Also, many of the required applications do not require the end user to write code to do work.

There is still some way to go before any of the software packages is across-the-board competative with software offerings from ESRI or MapInfo but I would like to think that for end-user applications for much typical GIS work is coming together now. And many specific tasks are already filled better by open source tools in in this space, than by commercial tools.

In short, I feel your claim these are programmers tools, and not finished applications is unfair though I will conceed that none of these applications (with the possible exception of GRASS which has some ease of use issues) has as large a feature set as the major proprietary packages.

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[geodude]

There are a number of recent efforts in the exploratory spatial data analysis real that attempt to deliver on the "end user" side of things, for example:

Geoda http://sal.agecon.uiuc.edu/geoda_main.php

STARS http://stars-py.sf.net

Choro http://choroware.sourceforge.net/

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[SendBot]

I use MapInfo at work, and was toying with a custom alternative using SVG output of the image_gis php module. More info here

I didn't get very far as the documentation is pretty light, and I have a hard time coming up with info in the Arcinfo/E00 format or finding a decent converter.

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[Anonymous Coward]

This is, alas, common in the open source world. Everybody does their own toolkit that does 90% of what other toolkits do, adds 10% of its own, and assumes that the user is a person who gets their jollies from writing code, not actually using the application with production data.

There isn't anything quite like generalizing something to death and then using meaningless statistics just pulled out of the air to make an ideological argument...

"Facts? I don't need no stinkin' facts, this makes my argument and sounds like I know what I'm talking about!"

*sighs*

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[KjetilK]

GRASS is pretty powerful, but it's not something anybody can just start using; it's more like something a Unix GIS professional (difficult but powerful systems like ESRIs) would find interesting.

That's very interesting! I was wondering if you could give me some advice...?

This is the situatation: I'm looking at GIS now, as I need to expand my skills, and only solutions running on Linux will come under consideration. Furthermore, I wouldn't trust systems where I can't inspect the source code. It doesn't need to be free as in speech, but the source code must be available.

I've looked at GRASS, since it is in Debian. It segfaulted on me when I tried to load a data set, so I didn't get very far. It did indeed look rather hard to use, but since I am a long time UNIX user, and can do some hacking myself, perhaps it is for me anyway...? I'm also a long-time R user (I love that system), and the two are supposed to work well together.

So, what you're saying is that GRASS is a powerful system, but has a steep learning curve?

That's quite OK by me... But does it flatten some time? That is, is it designed so that when you've grokked the fundamentals, you can pretty much do anything?

I think what I'll do the most is to create topographic maps from DEMs. Then, I may do some tracings of LANDSAT or ASTER data, to add some rivers, glaciers and stuff like that. How hard would this be?

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[isdnip]

I couldn't tell you what the learning curve of GRASS is like -- it's so steep up front that I've never been able to get anywhere. I've installed it, but even using the Tcl menus, I haven't been able to really use it. I think it takes having an expert sitting next to me showing me what to do. I don't have such an expert here.

To be sure, I did have such help to get started in MapInfo, but once I got the hang of it (quickly), the learning curve for most things was not too bad. Although it is rather sloppy in some respects.

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[Anonymous Coward]

GRASS is very UNIXy. If you know UNIX, some shell scripting, &/or some C, GRASS is a beautiful beautiful thing. Yes, the learning curve is a bit steep but there are wonderful views from the top.
I wouldn't take on both UNIX and GIS at the same time. If you know one or the other, GRASS shouldn't be too bad though.

The Tcl menu system was reimplimented a month or two back, now things are quite a bit easier (versions 5.3 or 5.7). You now can use it with QGIS for super user friendly mode too (5.7 only).

You really need to buy the Neteler & Mitasova book or borrow it from your local library. There are some useful tutorials online, but they are mostly a bit old. Read the book. It's really good.

Latest Debian package fixes some bugs; I think the r.in.gdal bugs are only sorted out in newer versions though. (the Debian package is from a rather old version of GRASS)
You may need to compile the latest GDAL-cvs + GRASS-cvs yourself to get the more rare raster formats to import correctly.

It is designed so that when you've grokked the fundamentals, you can pretty much do anything.
Yes. You just need to get your head around some of the quirks. Then it's all logical & mostly consistent.

-- happy grass user

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[KjetilK]

Thanks for the response! As an experienced user, would you advocate that Debian should go for 5.3 or even 5.7 in Sarge? It seems a bit too conservative to me to go for this very old version, especially when it has critical bugs in import functions... If so, perhaps you could file a bug about that...?

Re:Programmers' tools, not finished applications

[spatialguru]

This next 12 months will see several projects that finally come together to dispel those claims to a greater degree.

There are enough pieces that they can all work together. I fear that maybe the real question is around user interfaces. It's funny because I will be introducing some excellent mainly command line tools like ogr2ogr (heard of that? ;) and PostGIS commands, etc. to my colleagues. I know it won't look at "usable" as other commercial options - but eventually they'll realize that there are VERY REAL open source alternatives that start to look a lot like AML (but soo much more).

So I think once we get over the CLI vs GUI warz in the OSGIS realm, then we'll feel we've made it further.

Its good, but not the complete picture

[PierceLabs]

What we need are good royalty and free-use datasets that allow open source products to actually be able to do high resolution GIS queries. Without a large volume of free data, having an open source GIS system isn't enough.

Re:Its good, but not the complete picture

[spatialguru]

I think that's our job. You know where your house is, where your work is and the street you drive down every day.

What I want to see is an Open Data Consortium where joe-users create their own data and pool it. I'll take responsibility for my town, you do yours, you others share the city with even more.

Interested?

open source?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Name : 2004-05-OSS-Briefing.doc

These "open source GIS" people need to learn a few things about "open source software." Presentation in Microsoft Word format? Faux pas!!

Re:open source?

[Anonymous Coward]

In your efforts to point this out, you posted from a computer with proprietary hardware and drivers. You should stop using the internet, because your post passed through proprietary Cisco IOS routers along the way. Now that you can't download Linux from the internet because it is passing through proprietary medium, you can't buy it on CD either because it was pressed from proprietary systems. And you can't ask Linux distros to ship it by snailmail because post offices are operating with proprietary systems. And you can forget buying Linux books because is was printed from proprietary OS with proprietary printer drivers. And you can't drive to distro's office to have Linux installed directly on your computer because your car contains proprietary software and technologies. Thinking about walking, no you can't, your shoes are proprietary and were manufactured with proprietary machinery. Walking barefoot is not an option either, because the pavement is proprietary. You are stuck in your proprietary house. You can't even kill yourself to escape this proprietary world, because the gun, knife, or rope you would use to do so are proprietary as well. It must suck to be you.

Re:open source?

[spatialguru]

It's called a format. I prefer to look at Word as a data format for open office documents. Oh yeah, that Msoft product can read it too. Neat.

Refractions Research = excellend support

[Anonymous Coward]

Just want to say that Refractions Research's postgis mailinglist is one of the best customer support experiences I've ever had. A prototype of one of our future products (crime mapping software) is based on PostGIS, and 4am the night before a customer demo we were having some problems (postgres optimizer on geom indexes).

By 4:30 AM we had exchanged about 3 emails each way, fixed all the problems and had a great demo. If we land the client, we're hiring them.

Irony strikes

[A_Non_Moose]

As the sys admin for a GIS lab, I was curious and clicked the link, only to be amused to see:

2004-05-OSS-Briefing.doc

Heh, funny.

Re:Irony strikes

[Anonymous Coward]

Irony as in dictionnary definition or as in Alanis Morissette? You ironically posted from a computer with proprietary hardware and drivers. You should stop using the internet, because your post passed through proprietary Cisco IOS routers along the way. Now that you can't download Linux from the internet because it is passing through proprietary medium, you can't buy it on CD either because it was pressed from proprietary systems. And you can't ask Linux distros to ship it by snailmail because post offices are operating with proprietary systems. And you can forget buying Linux books because is was printed from proprietary OS with proprietary printer drivers. And you can't drive to distro's office to have Linux installed directly on your computer because your car contains proprietary software and technologies. Thinking about walking, no you can't, your shoes are proprietary and were manufactured with proprietary machinery. Walking barefoot is not an option either, because the pavement is proprietary. You are stuck in your proprietary house. You can't even kill yourself to escape this proprietary world, because the gun, knife, or rope you would use to do so are proprietary as well. It must suck to be you.

You fool!

[Anonymous Coward]

You blew it! You could've made so many funny jokes playing off the potential irony of attending a conference on mapping, instead of just stating the obvious. Examples set heretoforthwith:

"Yeah I was supposed to attend this conference...but I got lost on the way."

"The annoying thing about those GIS guys....they never stop to ask for directions."

"Yeah, well at least with the GIS guys you always know where you stand."

"Hey, did ya see the meeting agenda? It was like,
Opening Remarks: 45d19'23"N, 78d52'34"W
Workshops: 45d19'27"N, 78d52'29"W
Keynote Speech: 45d19'......"

OK, I didn't say they'd be good jokes, but they don't really have to be on /. ...

(Who's the geek who can tell me who to get /. to print a goddamn degree sign..won't print html special chars...)

Re:You fool!

[mnewton32]

hell, it won't even print a pound sign for the poor british folks. and look, it stripped all the capital letters out of my post!

Here's Hoping

[Nilmat]

Back in the summer of 2001 I used GRASS pretty extensively. At the time, it could do a lot of the same stuff as ArcView and ArcGIS but was vastly clunkier in doing it. Think Gimp vs. Photoshop a few years ago. I'm glad to see that open source GIS lives on, since a workable alternative to ArcGIS is absolutely essential for those of us in academia. In fact, I've given up on ArcGIS and still use ArcView because I can't stand the damn thing. It also doesn't help that you can't run ArcGIS under anything OS but Windows, since its all written in VB. I've even tried to run ArcGIS under Windows via VMWare, but it doesn't recognize the necessary hardware key. Enough with rant there, but in any case I guess I'm just hoping that one of these open source alternatives will be viable in the near future.

Re:Here's Hoping

[SsShane]

Some ESRI rep told me they were porting ArcGIS to Unix/Linux. I think ArcGIS blows Arcview 3.x out of the water, by the way. In my opinion, open source GIS has a long way to go but I am happy that it exists in the first place. GRASS can do some stuff that ArcGIS can't such as compute aspects and such. Sure I have to go through the equivalent of sticking a hot iron in my eye but it's cheaper than the ~$2500 pricetag ESRI asks us for for the same functionality.

Re:Here's Hoping

[Jim_Maryland]

ESRI hasn't truly ported all of ArcGIS to *NIX platforms and I'm not sure that they will. ArcGIS uses COM for it's ArcObjects (which is what ArcGIS and several of the other offerings from ESRI are built on) and for ArcIMS they have included a COM application for use on UNIX systems to provide limited ArcGIS support (sort of like their "ArcMap Server for ArcIMS" that was only available for ArcIMS 4.x on MS Win32 platforms).

I have been using ESRI products since ArcInfo 6.1 (used on DEC Ultrix back in early 90's) and ESRI seems to pretty much own the GIS market. At my current job, I build/integrate various applications for geospatial/imagery and automated analysis and find that my customers really don't look for anything but the COTS applications with some small amount of "wrapper" code. I'd like to see Open Source GIS suceed, but don't know if it will in the corporate world where several thousand dollars isn't much compared to the time/money spent on working through an Open Source product. Eventually I see Open Source GIS working, but probably not in the next couple of years.

As for ArcGIS, I use it, but find that it runs way too slow. Give me an Arc prompt and I'll be much happier. ArcGIS consumes a good bit of memory and takes way to long to perform operations that were done much faster on the older ArcInfo software on much less of a system (CPU/memory).

Maybe the Open Source products will mature faster if open data formats are fully supported. Unfortunately ESRI only seems to do "lip service" to supporting things like Open GIS Consortium (OGC).

BTW, messed around with Ionic Software's RedSpider and it seems to do a decent job at serving WFS data, but it has a hefty price tag ($50K +). Can anyone recommend a good Open Source WFS/WMS server that can read either Oracle Spatial or ESRI ArcSDE data sources? I've looked at GeoTools and they don't seem to be "there" yet.

Re:Here's Hoping

[Mik3D]

Mapserver can serve WMS/WFS and can be compiled to support ArcSDE, if you have the SDK available. It is an excellent project with a great support community.

Re:Here's Hoping

[Jim_Maryland]

I'll have to check it out a bit more but my initial review shows that it does not impliment the WFS Transactional (WFS-T) which I'll need. I'll have to see where they are with WFS-T and maybe my group can develop the code for it. We've already implimented our own internal WFS-T, but it's to an older specification (along with some "short cuts") and I don't think we were looking to maintain it regularly. Maybe we can at a minimum donate some code, but need to check with the managers to see if the company will let it go.

Thanks for the tip.

Re:Here's Hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

DeeGree (deegree.sourceforge.net)

Re:Here's Hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in the summer of 2001 I used GRASS pretty extensively.

Back in the sixties I used grass pretty extensively too. I don't know what ArcView and ArcGIS is but I know that LSD was some pretty wild stuff. If you find yourself using grass every day you might want to talk to your doctor or minister to get a little perspective. Admitting it when you have a problem is the first step.

Re:Here's Hoping

[Jim_Maryland]

Thanks for the update. Last time I had checked DeeGree they didn't have the WFS-T capabilities. The WFS-T capabilities appear to be fairly new as of April 2004 so I guess I'll be evaluating it again.

Re:Here's Hoping

[ianturton]

check out GeoServer It's the open source OGC reference implementation of the WFS specification. It does WFS-T.

Ian

Re:Here's Hoping

[Anonymous Coward]

For a pretty complete list of Open Source GIS projects out there check http://www.opensourcegis.org . It's suprising how many mature GIS projects there are. Of special interest is Udig which is an effort to pull several of the best together into killer app type form.

This would be a good thing for WiGLE

[ONU CS Geek]

I use and upload information into WiGLE (wigle.net), and having information like this would do wonders in having accuracy in mapping and plotting. There ahve been times where I've plotted information, but the information from Tiger isn't up to date, so my plots don't look like they're on roads.

Now, if we could only work on GPS accuracy. Sure, 21 feet is 21 feet, but, still...I'd love to be able to wardrive and know exactly where something is at. (Yes, for the subtle, I know that 21 feet doesn't make much of a difference with a Wi-Fi point, but, being able to accurately identify where a point is would be nice. Instead of knowing where on Randall Road something is, it'd be the bomb if we could pick up something like 4033 Randall Road from the GPS Coordinates.)

Maybe I'm just dreaming, or had one too many to drink on a Saturday night.

Re:This would be a good thing for WiGLE

[timelady]

also nice for geocaching accuracy....

Re:This would be a good thing for WiGLE

[SsShane]

What's WiGLE? wigle.net is dead on my end. Anyhow, if you spend the money, you can get GPS accuracy to within one centimeter according to the many consultants that court us. We currently use a Leica unit that talks to Coast Guard base stations on the fly which is called Real Time Kinematics or something that gives you sub-meter accuracy. To get the one centimeter accuracy you need to subscrbe to a serice that's only ~$700/mo, rougly ;) The accuracy in GPS lately has licensed surveyors in a bit of a tiff by some articles I have read. The word "flim-flam artist" comes up a lot.

Re:This would be a good thing for WiGLE

[ONU CS Geek]

Try http://www.wigle.net/

And, from their homepage:

Getting Started

WiGLE.net is a submission-based catalog of wireless networks. Submissions aren not paired with actualy people; rather name/password identities which people use to associate their data. It's basically a "gee isn't this neat" engine for learning about the spread of wireless computer usage.

WiGLE concerns itself entirely with 802.11b networks right now, since it's REALLY hard to deal with cellular networks, 802.11a is so hard to catch, and everything else is so small-share. 802.11b appears to be experiencing an explosive growth, and it's neat to see it cover cities.

the first step in using WiGLE is to create a username for yourself. You don't have to submit anything other than a made-up name and password, validation is immediate, and we will not contact you (unless you wanna chat on our message boards). This will give you access to our query engine and software downloads.

once you've done this, you're free to send us wireless network traces (in any of our listed formats, usually pairings of wireless sample, names and network hardware addresses (for uniqueness), data/SNR triples and GPS coordinates) or enter networks manually. Note, your username gets "credit" for these, but of course some people don't want their networks listed (various reasons), so we delist these immediately upon request. If you're visiting us to ask for removal, just make an ID and ask about your network through the query page. Once you make a user id, you can look at the submissions statistics page to see how users stack up.

To view networks, you can 1.) ask the website, 2.) download one of our clients. The clients are particularly fun to look at, but require either a java-1.3-and-up machine (windows, sunOS, MacOS-X, linux, mostly) or a windows box, for the new windows-native prototype. This will superimpose "points" from a live query onto a map of an area. Maps can be downloaded in "packs" from our mapping engine and are installed simply by unzipping them into your client installation directory. Mappacks are created and served by-state-by-county, or in the case of large cities, by-state-by-city. If we haven't generated a map for your area of interest yet, ask for it, and come back after the rendering engine's had a minute or 5 to think about it.

Overall, WiGLE aims to show people about wireless in a more-technical capacity then your average static map or newspaper article.

If your network is in WiGLE and you don't like it, we'll take it out immediately, but you should look into making your network harder to detect AND more secure; remember that you're the one bombarding passers-by with your signal. We aren't affiliated directly with any particular community or interest (other than our own), but we appluad the efforts of the people who wrote the stumbling software that feeds our project, the people looking to use wireless in innovatove ways, and especially the community of people who just dig wireless network access and dig sharing it. (freenets)

I wouldn't trust an open source mapping system..

[Anonymous Coward]

because I expect that where Redmond, WA is, the map shows a giant lake. :)

A doc

[Anonymous Coward]

What a load of bs, someone does a paper about opensource software in a propritory format. Takes away a lot of that persons credibility, dosn't it.

Re:A doc

[ozmanjusri]

I think it shows that Open Source is big enough not to worry about petty issues like demanding reliance on our own formats.

Just about every OSS word processor out there can read MS .DOC files, so it's not like they're causing us any hardship by using a format that's as common us muck, and not directly related to their field.

It's out there.

[sp0rk173]

As an undergrad researcher currently doin a heavily GIS-intensive project, i have to say the data is out there. In the US, the USGS provides multitudes of data for free, as does the EPA (the BASINS dataset is HUGE and completely free). Granted, it's hard as fuck to track down if you don't know someone who has already had to sift through the many, many websites out there that hold the data - but it's out there. What needs to be done, I think, is for the community to create some kind of central portal that makes it easy to find, and then download all of the data. THAT would be helpful.

Re:It's out there.

[Anonymous Coward]

As an undergrad researcher currently doin a heavily GIS-intensive project, i have to say the data is out there... it's hard as fuck to track down if you don't know someone who has already had to sift through the many, many websites out there that hold the data Someone like you? And yet there are no links in your post...

Re:It's out there.

[sp0rk173]

heh. I do my work on campus in my office there. Today being saturday, and it being night time, i'm not on campus in my office, and thus do not have the links on hand. Google for USGS DEM and you'll find plenty of starting points.

Re:It's out there.

[vsprintf]

What needs to be done, I think, is for the community to create some kind of central portal that makes it easy to find, and then download all of the data.

What data is it that you need and is not available via the USGS National Map? There's a lot there besides topography, and it's constantly adding new datasets.

Re:It's out there.

[sp0rk173]

I actually did run across that when I was looking to download data to feed into GRASS (before we got the licensing fiasco dealt with for ArcGIS...I've really come to despise pay-to-use software...it's a pain in the ass). I didn't actually get to use the data i downloaded, but as the project continues i probably will.

If you want to know what it is that i need, basically i need DEM raster data and stream vector data to delineate watersheds. As the project develops, i'm going to need historic fire data to lay over the watersheds, and information about the fire's intensity and duration.

Re:It's out there.

[vsprintf]

I don't know about fire data, but IIRC, DEM data was the first dataset available on the National Map, and SRTM was added recently. AFAIK, it's all free in small enough chunks. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Again, IIRC, hydrography DLG vector data is available through older USGS sources if not the National Map.

Re:It's out there.

[sp0rk173]

It's on the national map, but not downloadable. I downloaded some data sets and haven't looked at them , though, so it might be included. Thanks again for the link.

Re:It's out there.

[mapmaker]

You can still get USGS DEMS at the GIS Data Depot. Originally all the data there was free, but little by little they've been fencing it off into the paid "premium" area. But DEMs are still free to download.

Re:It's out there.

[vsprintf]

I should have provided an easier link straight to the downloadable stuff. I believe they are adding DOQ data currently. The DLG hydrography data should be available free (from other USGS sources) in SDTS format. You have to find a conversion utility, which is a pain, but it's free in that (non)format. HTH.

We have plenty of 'free' data...

[jim_deane]

There is a /ton/ of 'free' GIS data available on the internet.

I say 'free' because in reality the US taxpayers have paid for it, but take a look at things like:

Kansas DASC,

Census Bureau TIGER data,

collection sites like Geo Community,

and an almost limitless number of other sites. Most states now have GIS sites of one form or another, with downloadable data.

Jim Deane

Re:We have plenty of 'free' data...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true, and for once the US has taken the lead in free data.

It is ironic that in Canada, where GIS was pioneered, they charge what can be consitered outrageous amounts of money for high-quality data. The situation is similar in the UK.

The fight continues, although there are some here in Canada which understand the benefits of making the data freely available, for instance the City of Prince George is one that I know offhand.

Re:We have plenty of 'free' data...

[geekopus]

I work for the Georgia (USA) GIS data clearinghouse. We have thousands of free datasets, and very reasonable pricing on downloadable imagery ($5 per USGS quarter-quad). Of course the imagery is kind of old (most recent is 1999 color infrared), but many people still find it useful. You do have to sign up, but believe me, it's not for any sinister purpose. There's only two people with direct access to the data; me and the guy in the office next to me. We don't do anything with it but collect aggregate statistics so the state of Georgia can determine how best to fund data collection by who is using it and how often it is being used.

The clearinghouse main page

Direct link to the data

There's also good imagery on the USGS site for free, but you have to use their viewer to view it (it's not downloadable...).

And as far as open-source GIS, has anyone here tried GeoTools? That's the most complete OSS GIS toolset I've seen.....

Not true.

[sp0rk173]

ArcGIS runs in windows, linux, AIX, HP-UX and solaris. There's some functionality difference in ArcView once you enter the *nix/UNIX world, but it does exist.

check it out

It seems they might have changed things in version 9, but i'm not totally sure. Either way, i don't like the product.

Re:Not true.

[homesteader]

Just recently looked at version 9, still ships for at least Linux HP-UX and Solaris, can't remember if I saw AIX there.

Re:Not true.

[Nilmat]

Must be new for version 9. I gave up on it after version 8.something. Regardless, I don't think I'll go looking for it unless I can't avoid using it.

Re:Not true.

[Nilmat]

Actually, after my last post I took the time to explore the ESRI website as you suggested. Please let me know if I'm mistaken, but it looks like the server products (ie ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, etc.) run under various *nixes but the desktop products (ArcExplorer, etc.) do not. AV 3.x, of course, runs on a variety of platforms as does ArcInfo 7.x.

Data, not programs

[Anonymous Coward]

right now, what Canada needs is free access to high-quality current GIS data. The US has Tiger, we have nothing similar.
It's all controlled by municipalities. Toronto wants a small
fortune for copies of TAXPAYER paid-for data.

Re:Data, not programs

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at this, it has most of the canadian road network available for free (as in speech): http://www.geobase.ca

Re:Data, not programs

[dpm]

Yes, the lack of free geodata outside of the U.S. is a major problem for us at the FlightGear project. This is one area where the rest of the world (I'm Canadian) needs to emulate the U.S. rather than making fun of it.

In fact, not only does the U.S. make its own geodata available for free, but it provides nearly all of the available free geodata for the rest of the world as well, though at a lower resolution. We use the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) 3 arcsecond for worldwide elevations, the 1:1,000,000 vmap0 data for landcover, roads, railroads, lakes, etc., the GSHHS for coastline data, and the DAFIF for airport and navigation data, all courtesy of the U.S. taxpayers.

Re:Data, not programs

[RJack-45]

Manitoba does. Reasoning behind this is that it was paid for by taxpayers, and there's not reason why we shouldn't have access to it.
Ontario began something called GeoSmart, but it has apparently been cancelled. Municipal projects would receive funding for 50% of a GIS project, and would in turn share their data with other GeoSmart members.
The GeoGratis site has quite a bit of free GIS data.. Especially LandSat imagery. They also have landcover data for all of Ontario... and small scale base data for all of Canada.
I'd like to see more provinces follow MB's lead.

Re:Data, not programs

[spatialguru]

Things are coming together. Got a bright idea? Get some folks together and make a prhttp://spatialguru.com/maps/apps/global/'toposal to geoconnections.ca TIGER didn't just happen. I propose a global effort of having local folks map their community and consolidate it with others.

Each person takes their own area.

GRASS COMPLETE!

[atheken]

Well, I own a mac, so anything GIS that runs on it, I am happy with I just found GRASS Complete (like "Gimp.app") Anybody have a lot of experience with it and willing to "tutor me"?

Re:GRASS COMPLETE!

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy or find in your library the GRASS book by Neteler & Mitasova. It's really good.

See the links on the GRASS website for details.

Re:GRASS COMPLETE!

[atheken]

Who modded this as off-topic?

Re:Yeah, I've got one

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't have one. Now shut the fuck up.

Re:I wouldn't trust an open source mapping system.

[csbruce]

because I expect that where Redmond, WA is, the map shows a giant lake. :)

I would expect a giant glass-lined crater.

Still defensive...

[SuperKendall]

He's still on the defensive it seems after the fiasco of his honeymoon in "Paris".

"But honey, I never said France, now did I!"

Re:I wouldn't trust an open source mapping system.

[Anonymous Coward]

More like a vacumm and a mud pit.

What about the rest of the world?

[buchanmilne]

Sure, the US has a lot of free GIS data, but maybe you've heard that there people who live outside the US? And, maybe they also prefer free software, open formats and more available data?

Re:What about the rest of the world?

[KjetilK]

There is at least the SRTM-3 data set. It is an excellent data set covering most of the landmass between 60 N and 58 S (which, unfortunately just barely includes me...). It has a spatial resolution of about 90 meters and an elevation resolution of about 15 meters.

It's in a simple binary matrix, easy enough to hack up something to import it whereever you want.

Re:What about the rest of the world?

[jim_deane]

Sure, the US has a lot of free GIS data, but maybe you've heard that there people who live outside the US? And, maybe they also prefer free software, open formats and more available data?

Apparently you haven't looked. There is some free data available, from the US, on other parts of the world. Other countries and more local governments or organizations also do provide some free data.

The only datasets I have downloaded directly have been quite open format--in fact, they're completely unencoded, or they are encoded in a common format (such as a .bmp, .tif, etc.). The sofware just has to be smart enough to know how to import the various types of data, or you tell it how to do so yourself.

If you really want free GIS software, it is available--though not necessarily as powerful or easy to use as Idrisi or Arc products.

See G.R.A.S.S., a free military-based GIS package. It's available in a bootable CD distribution of knoppix, too.

Jim

Well, it's not open source...

[Anonymous Coward]

...But you can check out Route 66. I've heard mixed reviews...

Re: Questions about time and Earth

[some guy I know]

About how long does it take for Earth to orbit the sun?

Or how long, to the nearest minute, does it take for the Earth to complete one rotation about its axis?
Or how long is a day in terms of rotations of the Earth?
Even dictionaries get this wrong:

• The 24-hour period during which the earth completes one rotation on its axis.
• time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis

These definitions are, of course, incorrect; in 24 hours, the Earth completes approx. 1 + 1/365.25 rotations on its axis, and the time for Earth to make a complete rotation on its axis is slightly less than a day (by about 4 minutes).

(Note to picky people who may wish to discuss sidereal days: I know what sidereal days are.
We are discussing here regular, 24-hour days.
Here is proof that a day is exactly 24 hours long:

$ units
1989 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units

You have: 1 day
You want: hours
* 24
/ 0.041666667
You have:

)

THERE'S NO DATA!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

For at least 90% of the world, there is no free GIS data at useful resolution. There's free data for most of the US, but not much for the rest of the world.

I'd say free data is the real issue, not free software.

Re:THERE'S NO DATA!!!

[kelk1]

You are so right. I think there are two reasons for that. First, the knowledge of positions has been and is somewhat still considered a military secret. Many mapping agencies (all?) come from a military background, so they are naturally reluctant to reveal the data. Second, they are making loads of green by selling the information to professionals who need them (e.g. surveyors).

Re:THERE'S NO DATA!!!

[241comp]

Try http://www.digitalearth.gov/ - yes it is funded by the US and yes it is somewhat limited in its detail but it does have a large amount of data for most of the earth.

Re:THERE'S NO DATA!!!

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

I think you're right. I've noticed this, too, and I'm perversely amused by it, as it's exactly the reverse of the way things USUALLY seem to be stated (i.e. normally it's "We European types get free service from The Government(tm), whereas you Yanks have your Government(tm) selling out to rich corporations!"... I suppose a study of the sociological forces at work in this isolated role-reversal would be kind of interesting - any sociologists/political scientists out there looking for a thesis topic?...)

Re:THERE'S NO DATA!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I reckon it's got something to do with who the service is aimed at... in Europe, map data is seen as something of use to companies only, and there seem to be no compunctions about charging for government work in that case. In fact I've heard such opinions that it could be illegal for the government to undercut commercial providers in areas where it doesn't have a clear legal obligation to provide the service.

A case in point is the Finnish Digiroad project which is aiming to provide a very complete vector map of all Finnish roads including speed limits etc. The project is run by the ministry of transport and the purpose is to stimulate development of logistics services. At first they were planning to provide the data at cost of media, but then they had some delays and I guess their funding was running out so now they are talking about providing data sets for a few thousand euros. And no one is complaining -- in the US people expect the government not to own rights to data but there is no such principle at stake over here. Discussions focus on where the funding is going to come from, and thus charging for data becomes a natural conclusion.

As regards "selling out to corporations", one could make a case that the US government is doing exactly that by providing free map data. But this argument would have to ignore the uses of map data in research, and indeed the fact that members of the general public cannot find innovative uses for the data if they are not given access to it.

Re:THERE'S NO DATA!!!

[spatialguru]

Well, NASA has a WMS service that serves up a global landsat mosaic. I wouldn't agree with your statement whatsoever. You can load this data up and make it your base to start with.

Or were you looking for geocoded street data for the Congo?

Not quite GIS

[Space cowboy]

... but it has big plans to be - see my sig :-)

Simon

You don't have a clue

[Donny Smith]

> Anyone else have a clue why information about an open source anything would be in a proprietary MS format?

Yes - the reason is that OSS fanatics like you fill the Internet touting how good OpenOffice is (including reading proprietary formats) and yet when someone uses the format you bitch about it anyway.

I suppose the politically correct way would be to spend more time time to create the same goddamn thing using OO or perhaps write everything by hand, scan it and save as PNG.
Hence the term "open sores".

(To those who will mod me down: go ahead. I have OO installed on all my Windows client systems. There's nothing wrong with the software itself but the way these Red Guards promote it does make a lot of people sick.)

Re:You don't have a clue

[shaitand]

"I suppose the politically correct way would be to spend more time time to create the same goddamn thing using OO"

Exactly what part would take longer to make in OO? Unless perhaps your used to the menu's in MS office (which are by no means intuitive).

And yes, it makes perfect sense to me that you'd write promote open software in an open format.

Believe it or not, the open source software you use, like OO. Actually wasn't written and worked on so that leeches such as yourself could get a free ride and then bitch about the people who write the software at every opportunity (while still enjoying your free ride I might add).

So get off your ass and contribute something back. Or take option B and keep leeching off the sweat and blood of others. But if you choose option A rather than B please do us all a favor and STFU because we volunteered to write some software you can use, we didn't volunteer to hear you whine.

Re:You don't have a clue

[SlamMan]

So, what, they were supposed to put it in an .sxi people without Open Office (read: almost everyone that has a computer, certainly most their audience) can't read it? Supporting open source doesn't mean everything you do needs to be open source. Because I work with apache, and advocate it over IIS, doesn't mean I'm going to chuck Dreamweaver and Photoshop, or not deal with .psd files.

Just because the format is open doesn't mean its the best solution. I'd say they should have made a pdf, but thats just me.

Re:You don't have a clue

[shaitand]

90% of people with computers can't read doc files either?

Believe it or not, most people DON'T shell out $200-300 for Office after shelling out $500 for a computer.

I'd agree that pdf would be the appropriate choice. The pdf format is well documented.

Re:You don't have a clue

[Russ Nelson]

.pdf, not .doc, nor .sxi.
-russ

Re:You don't have a clue

[CodeMonkey4Hire]

You might want to consider that many non-elite programmers know windows apps better (i.e. fear them less). If they used a format that wasn't readable by either MS Word or Adobe, then they would probably be scared away. (Yes, I know people like this. No, I don't beat them over the head because of it.)

Just because we hate the paperclip, doesn't mean everyone else has to.

<generalization>
(You are not going to convert all of the Windows users. You should target the younger generations and let the older ones die out. Not soon enough for you? Tough. This won't happen overnight.)
</generalization>

Re:You don't have a clue

[Anonymous Coward]

<laughing>
90%? You are claiming that MS Word has a 10% market share?
</laughing>

Re:You don't have a clue

[shaitand]

As I've said elsewhere, pdf is well documented, by Adobe. While not open source developed, it is at least an open format.

10yrs from now, you'll still be able to read a pdf in your application of choice.

The .doc format is entirely closed and has been reverse engineered. Microsoft has been known to change it. Since the current incarnation has been reverse engineered it's a safe bet that Microsoft WILL change it again.

Re:You don't have a clue

[SlamMan]

You realize WordPad opens .doc files, right?

RTFA!

[KjetilK]

They have made everything available in at least .sxi too!

It's not "fanaticism"

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, it really isn't the point of this thread, but proprietary file formats really are a problem, and a major way in which Microsoft (as an example) tries to lock in their customers.

I don't think it would have taken any longer to have written it in OOo - afaik, maybe it was written in OOo, and the author saved it as a .doc file so that Windows users would know how to open it. Anyway, I think everyone who cares about freedom and open standards should consistently and politely recommend open file formats for all public communications.

Tons of Ontarios [Re: Where is Ottawa]

[j.leidner]

Ontarios outside the US:

1|-356249|-535329| -11.2833333| -74.4333333|-111700|-742600|WN65|SC18-15|P|PPL||PE |12||||N||||ONTARIO|Ontario|Ontario|1993-12-12
1| -894310|-1322756| -38.25| -72.1|-381500|-720600|YC56|SJ19-09|S|FRM||CI|04||| |N||||ONTARIO|Ontario|Ontario|1993-12-19
3|-12693 64|-1846857| -25.9166667|23.1333333|-255500|230800|GS13|SG34-08 |S|FRM||SF|01||||N||||ONTARIO|Ontario|Ontario|1993 -12-23
3|-1269365|-1846858| -27.2666667|26.7333333|-271600|264400|MK78|SG35-14 |S|FRM||SF|03||||N||||ONTARIO|Ontario|Ontario|1993 -12-23
1|-1636725|-2305677|22.9166667| -81.3166667|225500|-811900|MF63|NF17-06|L|LCTY||CU |03||||N||||ONTARIO|Ontario|Ontario|1994-01-12

Ontarios part of the US:

CA|Ontario|ppl|San Bernardino|06|071|340348N|1173900W|34.06333|-117.6 5|||||988|134825||Ontario
IA|Ontario|ppl|Story|19 |169|420209N|0934053W|42.03583|-93.68139||||||||Am es West
IL|Ontario|ppl|Knox|17|095|410443N|0901827W| 41.07861|-90.3075|||||802|||Wataga
IN|Ontario|ppl |LaGrange|18|087|414208N|0852257W|41.70222|-85.382 5|||||880|||Lagrange
KS|Ontario|ppl|Nemaha|20|131 |393400N|0955255W|39.56667|-95.88194|||||1205|||So ldier
NY|Ontario|ppl|Wayne|36|117|431315N|0771700 W|43.22083|-77.28333||||||||Ontario
OH|Ontario|pp l|Richland|39|139|404534N|0823525W|40.75944|-82.59 028|||||1390|3979||Mansfield North
OK|Ontario|ppl|Ottawa|40|115|365915N|094454 6W|36.9875|-94.76278|||||844|||Picher
OR|Ontario| ppl|Malheur|41|045|440136N|1165743W|44.02667|-116. 96194|||||2154|10344||Payette
PA|Ontario|ppl|Wash ington|42|125|400612N|0800429W|40.10333|-80.07472| ||||1060|||Ellsworth
VA|Ontario|ppl|Charlotte|51| 037|365918N|0782911W|36.98833|-78.48639|||||615||| Fort Mitchell
WI|Ontario|ppl|Vernon|55|123|434333N|090 3529W|43.72583|-90.59139|||||900|412||Ontario

And of course there are loads of Sheffields, Aberdeens and plentitudes of instances of pretty much any other name on earth (i.e. locations named 'Paris', 'London', 'Berlin') abound.

And today is?

[hswerdfe]

July 11th, it would be nice if someone would have told me about this ahead of time.. I live in ottawa and would have loved to atend

Re:And today is?

[Frank Warmerdam]

hswerdfe,

The conference was prominately announced in the free gis community. If you are interested in free GIS I would suggest you join the freegis mailing list at freegis.org to keep on top of stuff.

Re:And today is?

[hswerdfe]

Score, thanks man

Not to burst anyone's bubble, but...

[paanta]

As much as I'd love to see ESRI relinquish its stranglehold on the end-user map-making world, I don't think I'll see a good, open source alternative for a _long_ time.

I've worked for one of the largest regional planning agencies in the country, for a ~100,000 person city, with planners and environmental types at at U of Michigan, and done a fair bit of GIS work on my own. ~95% of that work has been with ESRI products. Except for some specialized spatial statistics software, and equally specialized transportation modeling packages, ESRIs stuff is (sadly) hard to beat.

The (paying, non-researcher) end-user, a GIS lackey in a planning office somewhere, someone doing work for some environmental group or maybe someone doing marketing analysis, is not going to deal with the hassles that most open source packages involve. The most successful open-source end-user programs tend to be things with a _huge_ amount of interest in them. You know, web browsers, mail clients, desktop publishing, etc. GIS is still kind of a niche market. Maybe I'm totally off-base in assuming this, but my feeling is that ESRIs core customers are the big metropolitan planning organizations and those are _incredibly_ slow moving organizations for the most part. IMO, there has to be a lot of oomph behind a project before it gets polished enough that Joe Blow, Metropolitan Planner, is going to use it.

I love the idea of GRASS, but I don't see it ever out-doing ArcGIS. Open-source GIS needs to find a big, untapped market and branch out from there. I think what the open source GIS community needs to do is focus on a very stripped down package, as easy to use as a web browser, that lets the average person download TIGER line files from census, import ESRI shapefiles, add their own GPS data, with a big open source library of maps for people to play with. Leave out the analysis tools altogether, deal with things like map projection behind the scenes, and let people use GIS to plan gardens around their house, etc. Once you've got people using that, bloat the software from there, rather than slowly adding features to an already buggy, difficult to use package.

The other extreme of the spectrum is the high-end GIS work, where you've already got serious computer nerds working, and where there's always a market for a product that cedes some control back to the user, even if it is at the expense of some day-to-day usability. Thats where open source is already making inroads.

Re:Not to burst anyone's bubble, but...

[Russ Nelson]

GRASS can *do* all that stuff. It's just that ordinary mortals can't get GRASS to do it. The basic code underneath GRASS seems to be perfectly functional. It just needs to had a good user interface written from scratch, and then have the various GRASS mechanisms put underneath it.
-russ

Re:Not to burst anyone's bubble, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

See QGIS. If compiled right, it can read/display GRASS 5.7 raster and vector maps.

homepage: (down?)
http://qgis.sourceforge.net

alt:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/qgis/

Re:Not to burst anyone's bubble, but...

[GTD]

Recently I sat down to train some local government transport planners in some ArcView based software we wrote. Actually, most of the time was training them in ArcView 8 because they had little GIS experience.

You could see their eyes light up when they started to realise what they could do with it. "Hey, we could plot vandalism incidents on bus shelters! We could look for patterns in our accident reports!" Forget our code for now - just having mapping software on their desks was a revelation.

True, this wasn't in the most high-tech part of Britain, but I'm convinced there is a huge market for simple GIS that is as affordable as Word and Excel, and can just be on those people's desks.

Many companies and local authorities still have "GIS teams" that are off in some other office and charge a lot of money per map. It's like an old Computing Bureau again.

Open Source is not naturally accessible to these people. But the huge untapped market really is there. Further, they really need standards and interoperability - and OSS is much more likely to deliver this in *reality* than commercial vendors. (Ask yourself why ArcGIS 8 can't natively read MapInfo format files. They have a fully modular system for dealing with different formats. How hard can it be?)

Arc/INFO runs under Unices, ArcGIS doesn't

[xixax]

ArcGIS 8 was a ground-up re-write as COM/DCOM and is unlikely to ever run under unices. ArcINFO is more or less a "legacy" app and is bundled with ArcGIS, and it runs under just about any command line (except Linux), it is *nothing* like ArcGIS. ArcGIS 9 adds a bunch of missing capability (like a sane macro language) and goes a long way towards making it a "real" GIS, for example, the default macro language is Python, and you can script in whatever language you want, they have also fixed a bunch of other bits that have kept me from using ArcINFO (instead of ArcGIS) for serious projects (topology anyone?).

ESRI seem to be tinkering with making ArcGIS a bunch of components and also with Java, I hope that they continue with that direction and ditch COM. This is a good thing, because I (at this stage) doubt that there will ever bee enough of a user community to support a fully featured open source desktop GIS (unless maybe one is eventually built from the libraries being built for other OS GIS, things like GDAL, Proj4 and PostGIS).

Xix.

Re:Arc/INFO runs under Unices, ArcGIS doesn't

[sp0rk173]

because I (at this stage) doubt that there will ever bee enough of a user community to support a fully featured open source desktop GIS (unless maybe one is eventually built from the libraries being built for other OS GIS, things like GDAL, Proj4 and PostGIS).

I tend to agree with this. It kind of makes me want to take some time out after I finish my current research project and rewrite the interface for GRASS in gtk, qt, wxwindows - anything more modern than TCL/TK. While the interface isn't extremely difficult to figure out as it is right now, there are a lot of little annoyances that could be avoided. I would have to dig in to whatever gui library I chose, but I think it would go a long way towards building a stronger user base. I mean...it's a scary interface at first. Oh, and GRASS right now does use GDAL and PostGIS...not sure about Proj4, though.

not a need for data, but a need for ACCESS to data

[goatbar]

Yes, so it doesn't take long to discover that there is a mountain of data available for free here in the US. The problem is GETTING the data. What a nightmare. The DataDepot is truely a hideous system. And ArcWeb (or what ever their web map server thing is) is totally frustrating to all but the most patient. Data comes from 10000 sources in 100's of formats and require a different way to get each one. Please don't make me separately click to download the 50 different files just to make a basemap of a new field area.

I've triend to make an effort to show how to do this, but it gets frustrating! You can see what I did here at my Visualization Classes. I used to be a Arc/Info hardcore user, but got so frustrated I gave up. It's easier for a programmer to write their own than deal with all the cruft in Arc. However, it's great for creating funny war stories.

Re:I wouldn't trust an open source mapping system.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not so much a lake as a portal into the firey bowels of hell.

if open source could trump esri

[enrico_suave]

If OSS GIS could get to the point where it can do one thing better than ESRI arc* products it would be a very good thing.

(not to say OSS GIS doesn't do certain things better than ESRI... let me explain)

If the OSS development community can build say, a viable online mapping platform that was open it would be huge!

I'm sick to death of the ESRI upgrade/maintance ladder/extortion to get product revisions that fix the bugs in the original release. I'm tired of the convoluted bandaid approach to online mapping.

I'd welcome a solid OSS solution any day, ideally beable to serve ESRI format .mxd files...

blah...

e.

ArcGIS is written in C++

[wreckedsignal]

ArcGIS is written in C++. ArcGIS Engine and Server will run on various flavors of Unix/Linux. See here.

Where's the GPS?

[GoRK]

So, we've got all this wonderful open source GIS software, but no open source GPS navigation software that takes advantage of it unfortunately. It's like the open source GIS stuff is so complex and geared towards GIS applications, that it's next to impossible to make it do anything else like draw simple road maps.

Re:Where's the GPS?

[Dr.Dubious DDQ]

That's silly, everyone knows that REAL open-source geeks read road maps directly from the source code, not some wussy precompiled map! (That is, if census.gov gets its act together - for some reason I can't get to this page at the moment. Probably running some proprietary OS or something...)

Seriously though - there are two open-source "road map"-type programs that I know of...

GPSDrive is a 'general purpose' map display program. It doesn't render roads, etc. "on the fly" (though it WILL render NASA satellite images on-the-fly if you have the gigantic raw data file for it) but does have built-in downloading of maps from online sources or importing your own. (It also interfaces with Kismet for wardriving if you are set up for it).

There IS a project for generating roadmaps on-the-fly called Roadmap, though I've not yet tried it out. (I did, of course, just download the sourcecode so that I could...)

Re:Where's the GPS?

[GoRK]

GPSDrive, yes, I figured someone would bring this one up. I have used it a little in the car in testing from time to time. It does work marginally well by being able to show you where you are on top of pre-rendered maps; however, since it doesn't have any ability to access the low level data that was used to create these maps it can't even do something simple like figure out what street you are driving on (note the difference between showing you a map that shows your location moving down main street vs printing "Driving E on Main St.")

It would seem that with the wonderful (ok at least it's decent) TIGER data set being available that someone would have a simple library built that can index it, then provide a robust interface to rasterize maps from it, search it, and perform cost-based routing on it. I think that even ESR was working on something like this at one time, but I cannot find it anymore.

Re:Where's the GPS?

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/tmrs

Re:Where's the GPS?

[GoRK]

HECK YEAH! This is awesome! Thanks.

Re:Where's the GPS?

[PipsqueakOnAP133]

Oh, and Sumit (the guy who started that project) has been posting at www.thexcar.com/forums

The project's at a point where it might move over to a database backend. If you're a coder, start coding :)

Re:Where's the GPS?

[GoRK]

I was following xcar while it was still on the mp3car boards, but had not looked at it in quite a while. I switched over to linux for my carpc a few months ago, and am writing my own interface in OpenGL with perl. I'm not terribly great at C++ which is why I haven't really been that interested in xcar..

I have hopes to write a Garmin StreetPilot emulator to deal with navigation at some point.. unfortunatly, it's going to be probalby October before I'll have any time for a big side-project like this :(

Open GIS data formats are key.

[Anonymous Coward]

Without open GIS formats, publically available OSS GIS is doomed.

[Rant Mode: ON]

ESRI _owns_ the domestic and international GIS markets and ESRI is in bed with MS. Love it or hate it - this is the relationship that currently defines GIS.

In the U.S. this means that a large proportion of data is being created and distributed in proprietary, closed formats. This is data that "we" pay for and can't access without the high overhead of an MSWin-based ArcGIS workstation. Many, many thousands of dollars and the attendant babysitting headaches.

Of course, people say that the new ESRI GeoSpatial database format is open, etc. But the fact is that ESRI has had ArcGIS users on a forced upgrade path by breaking backwards compatibility for quite a while. Try to open and MXD saved in 9 in 8.3, or one saved in 8.3 in 8.1 - etc. They're broken. If they can't keep their own formats compatible - how well does that translate to open-ness?

Jack D. has done a great job implementing GIS principles - but he should keep in mind that he got his start with public funding and it's ultimately the public that picks up the tab for government POs and Oil Industry contracts. Dropping support for ArcView? Come on, where's the love for the little guy? Not everybody rides an NSF ticket you know.

We'll see how it all shakes out. But it won't matter a bit if Open Mapserver is a much better solution for many projects than ArcIMS, or that GRASS is an extremely powerful GIS if all the data is locked up in proprietary formats.

By the way - Somehow I missed the bit where the Python crew got credit for that little install ArcDesktop threw in. Give some credit - don't be afraid to admit Open Source is the future ;) We know that... Now we just need to ensure that folks know that Open Formats are as well.

[Rant Mode: OFF]

Why would anyone give data to these leeches?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Try http://www.wigle.net/
>
>And, from their homepage:
>

And from their odious EULA:

WiGLE grants you a non-exclusive right to use the maps and access point database (hereinafter, "the Data") on a single computer (i.e., with a single CPU).... [blah blah blah]

In other words, they take YOUR data, and then they assume ownership of it. Presumably the idea is that they will charge for access at some point.

if not, then why the restrictions? The data needs to be free, as in libre.

Re:Why would anyone give data to these leeches?

[BooTy6]

Nope, this is standard legal boilerplate. The community would dissappear and WiGLE would become useless if we started trying to charge everyone to visit. We're having too much fun to let that happen.

More on topic, we would love any non-U.S. street-level, non-legally entagled, non-expensive, geographic data. Canada has some arcview's with only a few strings attached, Europe has nothing. What would be very nice is if the U.S. government would release the VMAP1 dataset for the entire planet, which us taxpayers paid for (VMAP0 was released, but is much less detailed). For more info

What about the UK

[samjam]

http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/dataprod.htm

But no UK under Europe/Middle-east unless you count the south-coast that appears under France.

Hmmm

I've been looking for over a year for UK map data. I may find it yet.

Sam

Struck gold

[samjam]

More poking around finds:

ftp://edcsgs9.cr.usgs.gov/pub/data/srtm/
from
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/srtm/cbanddataproducts.ht ml

snck snck

Now to see what it really is....

Sam

http://local.google.com/

[modular_forms_boy]

still in beta, but it finds pizza ;-)

Re:Yeah, I've got one

[Anonymous Coward]

What, are you still here? Haven't you figured out that nobody gives a shit what you think?

At least you've dropped the whole "I'm not a troll and I have excellent karma to prove it!" shtick that nobody was buying.

Nice to see you at -1, fucktard. Now go the fuck away already.

Re:Danger, FUD!

[scglls]

Bzzzt! Wrong. None of the stated modifications are necessary.

Re:Maybe if KKKanada mattered...

[Lours]

See, Kanada, hate to burst your pouty bubble...but...you don't matter
You're just another euro-stan, except you're on this side of the ocean...same euro-trash socialism(with a dash of french snottiness)...whoop-ti-freakn-do...
Too bad you have to try crapping on others to boost your self-esteem...typical loser attitude...

Hey, look, there guys ! One of them seems to be trying to communicate ! What ? Yes ! Sure ! Look at the neural detector, it says that its second neuron is somewhat trying to heat up !
He seems to be stuck on some monotonous repetitive ritual chant, but at least it's better than just drooling on the carpet no ?