Random GIS stuff
2012-01-17 12:38:21.940441+00 by
Dan Lyke
1 comments
Shadow passed along Ask Slashdot: Open Source vs Proprietary GIS Solution?. It suffers from the usual fanboyisms and geography ignorance (and wow does /.'s current rating system appear to be broken), but a few things to dig up later:
[ related topics:
Free Software Software Engineering Astronomy Current Events Graphics Mathematics Maps and Mapping Java
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2012-01-17 15:52:45.481589+00 by:
ebradway
Must avoid inane Slashdot discussion... must avoid Slashdot... Must write
dissertation...
Some quick thoughts:
The National Map and National Atlas provide a wide array of
public domain data. Natural Earth's landscape layer is gorgeous though. It is
heavily hand-tweaked. You won't get anything that comprehensive, that beautiful
out of USGS (we're only funded to map the US and territories).
The UN keeps a pretty good list of
global data sources.
I like uDig's user interface better than QGIS
but QGIS is quickly becoming the dominant
open source desktop GIS because of it's comprehensiveness. I used to use OpenJump for quick-and-dirty vector data
exploration. I'd say if you are doing lots of stuff in Eclipse or you want to
build or extend a GIS in Eclipse, uDIG is the natural starting place. If you are
doing general spatial stuff in Java, OpenJump (or just Jump) is where you want
to be. If you are doing anything else with any other language, QGIS is the best
fit (it even has a built-in Python environment).
Of course, I tend to fall back in to ArcGIS because, despite all it's huge
short-coming, it is the most comprehensive desktop GIS available. ESRI even has
has .