The first step in putting together an open source suite of GIS software is to install some sort of storage medium for your spatial data. There are many options out there, ranging from the ESRI personal geodatabase, which uses a Microsoft Access database, to a fully relational database management system like PostGreSQL with PostGIS. Each [...]
The title of this post is in some ways rhetorical because to some people, this is their primary means of interaction with a computer. With the majority of people, though, I think a safe assumption is that the command line is something they have heard about, but don’t really understand where it is, or even, [...]
One of the major differences between many COTS applications and Open-source is in the area of adding layers and data to your project. While these programs share many of the same technologies on the back end to actually connect with the various data sources, for example, the GDAL/OGR libary, the user-interface is very different. ESRI [...]
This is the first post of the blog, so I suppose I should say what I think it is going to be about. Initially, I was going to begin writing a series of tutorials for using open source GIS products to mimic the functions of ESRI’s ArcGIS software suite. The more that I have started [...]