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."

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 [ottawa.ks.us] or Ontario [ontario.ca.us] 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.

doc file?

[shaitand]

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

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.

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: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:doc file?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

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: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.

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

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.