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

[Chris Wallace]

Brent,

As the conference is about FOSS GIS, you may wish consider mentioning
some of the FOSS products/projects (ie. Grass, MapServer, QGIS etc.)
occurring within the GIS marketplace which have been one of the driving
force behind the commercial vendors' (ESRI, MapInfo etc.) move to adopt
open standards.

Below a links to an Ingres press release on their commitment to OSGeo,
and an open source customer article on their use of Ingres.  Similar
articles can be found in relation to deployment of the open source
PostGRES RDBMS.

http://www.ingres.com/about/press/07-0924-osgeo.php 
http://www.itreseller.com/pr/20812 

The article on the "German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural
Resources" highlights that FOSS GIS is available, and viable, today
rather than being just backroom research projects as often portrayed by
some commercial vendors.

Regards 
Chris Wallace
General Manager 
Management Information Systems (WA) Pty Ltd 
Level 9, Ingres House 
231 Adelaide Terrace, PERTH  WA  6000
Ph: +61 8 9221 9221  Fax: +61 8  9221 9224
Email: Chris.Wallace at ingres.com 
Web: http://www.miswa.com.au

-----Original Message-----
From: pcreso at pcreso.com [mailto:pcreso at pcreso.com] 
Sent: Monday, 1 September 2008 05:51
To: Aust-NZ at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [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.