Open Source GIS Conference Wrapup

Wugger writes "The open source GIS community has been around for a long time, but has only been meeting regularly for the past three years. The most recent conference wrapped up on the weekend in Minneapolis. An excellent summary article and blog postings are available from Directions Magazine. Other attendees have also posted blogs and observations. The conference was attended by 300 people this year (up from 200 the previous year) and all the major open source GIS hackers were in attendance. In addition, some proprietary corporate players showed up to check out the scene: Autodesk, ERMapper, and ESRI, the Microsoft of the GIS industry."

Low Attendance?

[ndansmith]

The conference was attended by 300 people this year (up from 200 the previous year).

400 people were registered, but the missing 100 people were not able to locate the convention center thanks to faulty map software.

Harsh

[IchBinEinPenguin]

... the Microsoft of the GIS industry

That's like saying "these guys club baby penguins to death", especially on /.

Re:Harsh

[facelessnumber]

Well... It is a good analogy though. They're the biggest, most widely-adopted vendor of GIS software, they're all about vendor lock-in, they adore the "upgrade treadmill" (Anyone ever use ArcInfo 8.x? How long?) and their software is not just buggy, but buggy in a very special way with its nearly unique capacity to infuriate the user, perhaps dare I say, even surpassing that of Microsoft. At least Microsoft's horrorshow improves with each new release. ESRI's just gets different. Features come before b

Re:Harsh

[theapodan]

You whine and moan, but ESRI is on top for a reason, their features are useful, and the ones that they add that you malign for being buggy also are better than what the competition has generated.

If you really want to feel the pain, try GRASS, especially for Cygwin, where its basically unusable.

And for things that are difficult to do, ArcGIS 9 has much easier scripting with python than arcview did with AVENUE( arcview scripting) And the ancient arcinfo systems? Very painful to use.

I hail the new featur

Re:Harsh

[zero_offset]

And for things that are difficult to do, ArcGIS 9 has much easier scripting with python ...thanks to the integration of Microsoft COM.

And the grandparent poster was correct, they do have the upgrade treadmill thing going on -- if I'm not mistakened, the very next version ditches the new COM/VBA base and moves to .NET. (Or is it two versions out? I forget...)

Cool for programmers. Not cool for GIS shops with a lot of code. I'm presently making a lot of money on the side helping some local GIS folks port the

Re:Harsh

[facelessnumber]

Yep, everything you said is right. I was defending the validity of a "Microsoft of the GIS industry" analogy though, which I doubt you'll disagree with.

I whine and moan the same way a lot of people do. ESRI has a huge following, but their users aren't like Macintosh people. Everyone I know who uses ESRI software does so because it's the only option for what they do. (Or, yes, the best option) As GIS software, their stuff is great and functional. Probably the best under most scenarios. But as softw

Summary fails to mention primary open source GIS.

[theapodan]

GRASS http://grass.itc.it/ [grass.itc.it] is the primary open source GIS solution. The summary could have at least mentioned it in passing.

Odd that they mention AutoDesk too, considering their mapping software doesn't feature as nice spatial analysis stuff as ArcGIS does, although I haven't used it enough to make any other conclusions about it.

Now if GRASS would only improve their text interface and revamp their GUI.

Another critical open source GIS application for webmaps is MapServer http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ [umn.edu]

I've found that doing the data analysis with ArcGIS and displaying it with mapserver is the only way to go. ArcIMS is a bit too complex, at least compared to mapserver.

Re:Summary fails to mention primary open source GI

[eggegg]

Um, if you mean the excellent summary article [directionsmag.com] mentioned, GRASS is item number one.

That said, GRASS could be as powerful as Almighty God, but most people would never get past what is surely the worst user-interface known to man. C'mon guys, fix the damn thing already.

Re:Summary fails to mention primary open source GI

[Rich Gibson]

GRASS UI - You can now run the beautiful QGIS on top of GRASS, which gives you the best of both worlds.

The posters who mention the GRASS user interface neglect to mention that the prime GRASS UI is the unix shell. You can do _anything_ that GRASS can do within shell scripts, or python or perl, etc.

This also means that your scripting language has the power of the full UNIX tool chain philosophy.

The new GRASS Vector model also rocks, very hard, and you have full connectivity to PostGIS-the geospatial exte

One thing I've found missing in FOSS

[hey!]

aside from a user interface that doesn't make ordinary users scream in agony, is a geocoding engine. You put "123 Maple Street, Anytown, OH" and get coordinates. Pretty essential to the google maps kind of functionality, although for lots of stuff like store locaters you can go with zip code or town centroids.

Re:One thing I've found missing in FOSS

[rpresser]

Geocoding isn't hard. It just takes about 50 lines of code combined with a decent streets database. Add [sourceforge.net] PostGIS [slashdot.org] to your postgres [pgfoundry.org] streets database and you can even easily geocode intersections like "43rd And Pine Streets".

But, the only public domain streets database is the TIGER data, several years old already. However, ESRI does make it publicly available [pgfoundry.org] in shapefile format, ready for importing to postgres.

Maybe I've found a new project to start. Or at least a HOWTO to write.

OK, but it's not as easy as you make it sound

[hey!]

Well, sure, it's not hard to do if your standards of accuracy and peformance aren't very high, but people do put addresses in all kinds of odd ways. For example the same address can be "125 Joe Shmoe Highway W" or "125 State Highway 19B" or "125 Rt 19 Bypass". It gets even more fun when you have spanglish and franglish addresses as are common in some parts of the country "123B Calle de Ingenieros Locos North".

You can force the user to put things into different fields, like this:

Street Number:
Prefix Direc

Re:One thing I've found missing in FOSS

[rpresser]

Thank you! It's a shame you posted as AC; your information is very useful.

Re:One thing I've found missing in FOSS - Geocoder

[Rich Gibson]

There is the free http://geocoder.us/ [geocoder.us] web site that uses the Geo::Coder::US perl module.

The perl module is free software, and the Tiger data that it uses is also free.

The Geocoder.us web site runs this module to do lookups for non-profits for free (commercial use of the web site is not free-but you are welcome to download the code and the data and do it yourself for free).

As a note: The full census data when loaded into Postgis is something like 40 gb, and is dog slow. Refractions is working (or was wor

ESRI the Microsoft of GIS? If Only!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft treats its developers and resellers well. ESRI exploits them. We once had a lead we worked into a pretty significant sale, but there was one item on the list that we didn't have a price for. So we called ESRI and found out that policy said that quotes that included the product had to come direct from ESRI. We were told that if we sent them the lead, we'd get a commision. So, later we follow up with the customer, and they have all their goodies. So we call the ESRI manager we'd talked to, and a