[OSGeo-Discuss] RE: Next 5 years for OSGeo

[Julia Harrell]

One thing I'll mention, in addition to all the other good comments that have already been posted, is that I have a really difficult time trying to get the GIS users in my organization to even consider making a switch to one of the open GIS desktop applications instead of the expensive proprietary commercial package they currently use, because (more often than not) of the rather big gap in the "aesthetic quality" of the cartographic products the open GIS packages can (easily) produce. Despite continuing improvements over the last couple of years, the gap will still need to close a good bit more in terms of "average GIS users" being able to quickly and easily produce production quality map products before there's much real hope of any significant numbers of them being willing to migrate to open GIS desktop packages. Some of the open GIS server packages can produce some really beautifully rendered map images now, but the desktop packages don't seem to be quite there yet.  Easy map product templates (for unsophisticated end users) for placing all the map marginalia/decorations (labeling, symbols, legends, titles, charts, etc) and being able to produce a professional looking map quickly is still missing. All that "off the map crap" (as someone - I can't recall who - once called it)  really does matter to a lot of our users, who often have to be able to compose and print (or render to PDF) some really slick looking, high resolution maps for public hearings and other meetings and presentations. 

Being able to use the "old style" Arcview DBF file raster image catalogs in an open GIS desktop package  is another pain point for a lot of our users. We still use those a lot because we have some people who are tied to Arcview 3x (god help 'em) because of various extensions. I also prefer not to switch to a proprietary "geodatabase" raster catalog because the DBF-based ones can also do double duty (in complete shapefile format) as raster catalog tile index layers for Mapserver. I don't really want to have migrate a separate copy of our imagery to some proprietary "geodatabase" raster catalog data structure that only a single product can use. Also, with our "bandwidth issues" in remote field offices, connecting to a web map service is not always feasible, or even possible. We need to be able to have our imagery in a raster catalog that resides a local network file server where multiple users can all access it simultaneously in R-O mode, or even on a portable hard drive for use out in the field.  This kind of raster catalog functionality seems to still be missing in several open GIS desktop packages that might otherwise be somewhat viable contenders as an Arcview replacement for "average" or "casual"  desktop GIS users. If such functionality does exists as a plugin somewhere, maybe I just haven't found it yet, or maybe recent docs aren't fully available in English yet for some packages. If anyone can point me to a link for an open GIS Desktop package that has a plugin for Arcview "old style" DBF raster catalogs, with English docs, that "just works" with minimal manual configuration (no checking anything out of subversion or compiling any source code), a few of our users will be very eager to give it a test.