[OSGeo-Discuss] kicked the ESRI habit, now weening from Bentley MicroStation..looking toward FOSS4G

[Bob Basques]

Joe,

 From the municipal mapping side of things I would suggest you take a 
look at GeoMoose as a Web Front end.  It hooks to MapServer currently, 
and future versions will be using the OpenLayers LIB for the Mapping 
aspects.  It was designed from the ground up to facilitate publishing 
for the municipal data custodian perspective.  It also works well with 
all MapServer data connections such as PostGIS.

bobb



pyroGIS wrote:
> Fellow listers,
>
> Greetings all..let me start with a quick executive summary-type 
> thingy..I'm a relatively young GIS professional, my roots are in 
> Forestry, my major offered a GIS minor - I took it and I've turned 
> that into my focus (if i get another bachelors, heaven knows it will 
> be in computer science!). After working in natural resources, wildfire 
> mapping, etc. which were mainly GIS's deployed within an ESRI 
> framework - currently I'm with a small city (approx. 40,000 people) as 
> a GIS Tech where we're using Bentley MicroStation Geographics. Along 
> this route I've gotten involved with ArcIMS, KML/Google Earth+Maps 
> APIs and experimented with various open source Desktop GIS programs 
> like MapWindowGIS, QGIS and uDig to name a few..this has allowed me to 
> get my feet wet with a little JavaScript, XML, and general (X)HTML 
> along the way too. (Oh, and I gotta mention how much I love the 
> FWTools package too!)
>
> I've been researching OS for about one year now and have seen the 
> light. Also with an anticipated move outside of the United States soon 
> (Brazil, Italy, Greece or Australia), I think having the skills to 
> deploy/develop OS GISs will be helpful in finding work. In the 
> meantime, while I work here at the city I'm going to try to promote 
> moving to an OS suite for our GIS. Like I mentioned we're using 
> Bentley MicroStation Geographics with a SQL database. I'm coming from 
> an ESRI background before this and still getting used to it - but I'd 
> like to get my IT manager to see the benefit of deploying OS here.
>
> What I was naturally looking towards was using a QGIS frontend with 
> the GRASS plugin and PostgreSQL with the PostGIS plugin..this seems to 
> be somewhat of a standard for the Desktop GIS + Database duo from my 
> research on OS GIS..right? Where I'm wondering about going next is 
> down the whole Web Mapping road. What are your opinions on GeoServer 
> vs. MapServer vs. OpenLayers? Those seem to get the most love from the 
> OS community ... should I skip worldKit? what about deegree?
>
> I think I'll leave my rant at that for now - I am also interested in 
> various other things like contributing to the OSGeo community..perhaps 
> with documentation creation/editing, etc. as it's quite obvious I'm 
> not very well versed in computer science/programming..or getting 
> involved with GIS in the countries I mentioned previously as I'm 
> considering a move or discussing the various Masters programs in GIS 
> out there - but those are for another time ;) CHEERS_ joe
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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