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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."
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
It's in a simple binary matrix, easy enough to hack up something to import it whereever you want.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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.....
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.
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.
.mxd files...
(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
blah...
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Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
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.
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/