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."

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.

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.

Here's Hoping

[Nilmat]

Back in the summer of 2001 I used GRASS [grass.itc.it] 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.

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 [ukans.edu],

Census Bureau TIGER data [census.gov],

collection sites like Geo Community [geocomm.com],

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

Jim Deane

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:Where is Ottawa, Ontario, Canada?

[whiteranger99x]

Well there IS a City of Ontario [ontario.ca.us] 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: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 [appelsiini.net]

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: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: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 [geobase.ca]

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.