[gdal-dev] Re: [Live-demo] Image for the GDAL overview

[Even Rouault]

Hamish,

If I understand well what you are trying to do (try to evaluate the relative 
"popularity" of formats to present it graphically ?), I'm afraid the method 
used here will lead to lots of false results and a biased view of the 
"reality"

For example,

* http://www.google.com/search?q=GMT shows that GMT is mainly Greenwich Mean 
Time, Giant Magellan Telescope, Generative Modeling Technologies, ...

* when I try "Portable Network Graphics", I get 1070000, and not 998000 (I've 
the feeling that the results given by Google depend somehow of your IP 
address) . And it will probably lead to far less hits than "PNG" which the 
more popular term for it (but which is also Papua New Guinea...). PNG gives 1 
010 000 000 hits !!!

* "Shapefile" --> 2 570 000  but "ESRI Shapefile" only 183 000

* FIT and FITS have incredible high hits, while being quite obscure formats. 
The reason for that popularity burst is that they are mainly English verbs... 
or FIT = Fashion Institute of Technology, Fédération internationale des 
traducteurs, Florida Institute of Technology, Faculty of Information 
Technology, ...

* KAK is not a very significant name (and none of the results in the first page 
of Google shows a link with the format) for the JP2KAK driver, which is itself 
a GDAL-only codename for JPEG2000 with Kakadu library.

* "PostgreSQL/PostGIS" --> 58 500, but "PostgreSQL" --> 9 650 000 and 
"PostGIS" --> 324 000 ...

etc etc...

What would be more interesting would be to install a spy in the GDAL lib which 
would connect to a web site and increase the hit count of the appropriate 
driver for each successful opening of a dataset :-) And I'm pretty sure you 
would see geotiff and shapefile appear in the top of the list.

Best regards,

Even