[FOSS-GPS] FoxtrotGPS Mapping Library

[pcreso at pcreso.com]

My 02c :-)

As a long time FOSS GIS user (who used to work with pre-satellite fixes, then transit data, & at last, real GPS data!!), one thing I miss with most GPS software is the ability to natively utilise standard GIS data formats.

Traditionally, GPS units have not been too concerned with background raster or vector data, just with their track, marker & waypoint data.

Obviously this has changed markedly in recent years, with land & marine navigation systems & chart plotters largely supplanting basic GPS.

I can gather free topo, depth & road data, build my own maps with FOSS tools like GRASS, R & GMT. Build my own shapefiles & geotiffs, manange my data in PostGIS or SpatialLite, etc. But having done all the hard GIS work, none of the products (such as geotiffs, or png/world file combinations) can easily be used with a GPS software tool.

At least not one I've looked at...

I'd love to see support for world file image tilesets, as used behind web mapping applications such as Mapserver; shapefiles, spatial databases like PostGIS & SpatialLite from a GPS application.

Generally just better integration/interoperability between the FOSS GIS & FOSS GPS arenas.


Cheers,

  Brent Wood