[Aust-NZ] Any comments on this FOSS GIS abstract?

[Bruce.Bannerman at dpi.vic.gov.au]

IMO:


I'm not sure what you're asking here Brent. Are you developing this into a 
presentation / paper?


Seeing as you are going to Brazil (do you need someone to carry your bags? 
 ;-)  ), you may wish to mention in context one of the potential 'Next 
Generation' spatial projects that is being sponsored in that country and 
developed as FOSS spatial software, TerraLib.

I'm impressed by this product's future potential (on paper). I've yet to 
undertake a serious evaluation though. 

Terralib claims to deliver a framework to support vector and raster 
spatial data, managed within an RDBMS, complete with multi-temporal 
support. There is also OGC support being developed.


See:


G. Câmara et al., “TerraLib: An open-source GIS library for large-scale 
environmental and socio-economic applications”. In: Brent Hall (ed), 
“Open Source Approaches to Spatial Data Handling”.
Berlin, Springer, 2008.
http://www.terralib.org/docs/papers/TerraLib-OSBook-versionJanuary2008.pdf





Bruce Bannerman

 





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[Aust-NZ] Any comments on this FOSS GIS abstract?






Hi,

I'm scribbling out an abstract/summary (something under 1 printed 
page).... 

I was asked to participate in the panel at the end of a GIS/Fisheries 
symposium in Brazil last week, my topic: discussing GIS systems.

The following text pretty much follows my presentation.

I figured I'd run it past people here for comment, to help catch any 
factual errors (I do make the odd one or two occasionally :-) & to see if 
anyone has any suggestions to improve the wording or content.

Hopefully the text is largely self-explanatory, & you won't disagree much 
with the content, so despite not having been present, you may still have 
useful input on the content :-)



Thanks,

  Brent Wood

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Abstract for GIS Systems panel discussion:

Keywords: GIS, RDBMS, web services, OGC, spatial data.

This presentation discusses the nature of GIS & GIS systems, and suggests 
a broad definition of GIS: "A tool supporting interactions with data which 
have a spatial component." Such interactions include collecting, managing, 
querying, analysing, modelling, mapping, reporting, summarising, (etc), 
spatial datasets. GIS applications therefore may include a wide range of 
statistical, modelling, visualisation, etc. tools which are not normally 
regarded as GIS, but are often used to work with spatial data. 

Following this definition of GIS, a GIS system is defined as: "A software 
suite supporting one or more of these interactions to achieve a particular 
purpose."

Historically, it was common for spatial data management in a GIS system to 
be embedded within a  generalised GIS application. However, an ongoing 
change in the approach taken to spatial data management is the increasing 
role being played by spatially enabled RDBMS (complying with the OGC SFS 
standard), with separate GIS applications used for analysing & mapping 
these data directly from the databases. The whole suite comprising the 
"GIS system" defined above. Thus the architecture of more recent GIS 
systems is typically a suite of mapping/analysis/etc applications 
accessing data from a (often standalone) spatial database.

For example, within the ESRI GIS software suite, spatial and aspatial data 
were initially managed within a single GIS application. With the 
introduction of SDE, the spatial data management was carried out within 
the "GIS", but aspatial data management was carried out in a linked 
external database. Today, using the "geodatabase" approach, both spatial 
and aspatial data are increasingly being managed outside the traditional 
"GIS" application, using an external third party RDBMS.

Accompanying this change, perhaps in some ways driving it, is the use of 
the internet to access spatial data. This model further separates the 
functionality of spatial data management from other GIS functionality. Web 
access to spatial data (and metadata), via OGC web services (eg, CSW, WMS, 
WFS) is becoming increasingly common. Front end GIS functions 
(mapping, analysis, modelling, etc) are thus becoming (and in many cases, 
have already become) divorced from the foundation of data management. This 
approach to spatial data management (and access to these  data) is likely 
to address, at least in part, concerns regarding access to spatial data 
which were commonly expressed throughout this symposium. 

These changes are causing standards to become increasingly important to 
GIS systems, as compliance with effective common standards is the only way 
disparate applications can access externally managed data and become 
interoperating components of a working GIS system.

In the second of these symposia (2002) Open Source (OS) GIS software was 
discussed, but was not widely used, despite a high level of interest being 
expressed in it. Six years later, at the 2008 event, the majority of 
presenters had used some form of OS software in the work being presented. 
Those that used commercial GIS applications such as ArcGIS or Mapinfo, had 
often also used OS packages such as R:stats to analyse or model the data. 
Even those that used only ArcGIS v9.2 are now using OS software, as ESRI 
have included code from the OS GDAL (Geographic Data Abstraction Library) 
within their product. 

Apart from the obvious cost advantages, this growth in the use of OS GIS 
software is probably related to the change towards standards based 
applications described above. Historically, proprietary GIS software tools 
have had a commercial advantage in locking customers into a custom model, 
making it more difficult for other vendors' solutions to interoperate with 
their products. OS solutions, however, are written to perform in a more 
cooperative, standards based environment, and thus, at least for now, may 
offer some advantages for GIS users over more proprietary solutions. 




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