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Open Source Geographic Information Systems

Posted by michael on from the whereami dept.

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."

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Texas Mesonet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  2. Its good, but not the complete picture by PierceLabs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Refractions Research = excellend support by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  4. It's out there. by sp0rk173 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. not a need for data, but a need for ACCESS to data by goatbar · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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.