[postgis-users] Re: A bit off topic, but FOSS GIS clients...

[dnrg]

>Dear impatient person without an apparent name

Pleased to meet you fully qualified developer object
Frank Warmerdam. You may call me Dana--goodness knows
I've been called worse.

Thanks very much for your insights on FOSS GIS
development and project consolidation. There's much in
your response I hadn't previously considered. Sorry if
you feel my ramblings were impolitic or impolite, but
I'm happy with the result.

> At FOSS4G and similar venues there is often talk of
> how to share efforts though common
> libraries and such.

Good approach. Certainly necessary. But I wonder if
it's sufficient.

If there isn't one already, I would love to see a
survey conducted among conference attendees and others
on which FOSS GIS products they like best, why, where
the shortcomings are, etc. Making all the comments,
anonymized if desired, available to all the developers
of all the projects.

While it may be impolite for one development group to
suggest another ground disband, a detailed survey may
persuade without offending. Just a thought--hopefully
one that has been implemented already.

> I do not feel this can be a top down process, so
> essentially this is done by the community in an
> adhoc process as folks select the best project for
> their needs.

What is one to make of OpenOffice, its origins,
success, and any lessons the FOSS GIS community may
learn from its success? I realize OpenOffice began as
StarOffice from Sun, top-down (didn't it?) Is
OpenOffice where it is today because of its provenance
in closed source and top-down approach?

> The best way you can encourage consolidation is to
> pick a best-of-breed project for your needs, and
then
> to contribute to making it better.  This might
> include development, documentation, helping users,

Thanks again. There's always a need for good
documentation. Potentially, I could contribute there.

> promotion or funding.  Promotion can include gentle 
> advocacy of the project to the user communities of
> other comparible projects though this could turn
ugly
> if not handled a bit more nicely than this
> particular email was.

Since email has no inflection, I suppose you're right.
My post wasn't malicious in intent, but certainly it
arose out of frustration--primarily, the lack of good
support for basic data exploration and data discovery.
Ideally, metadata will tell you most of what you need
to know about the fitness of a particular dataset for
a particular use.

Call it impolite, call it impolitic, call it whatever
you wish. I won't mind. But I firmly believe basic
data exploration should not have an "import into
RDBMS" requirement.

Unless I'm mistaken--as I often am--the shapefile
remains the most widely used format for (vector)
spatial data exchange--at least among less technical
folks.

My bias is that I'd like to visually explore dozens of
vector datasets without having to commit to an import
operation for all of them.  

> This sort of meta-discussion likely belongs 
> places like OSGeo discuss list, or the freegis list.

Fair enough. I thought it less likely to to start a
flame war posting here first, so I can ask more
targeted, focused questions elsewhere--places where
people might indeed become offended. I feel life's too
short to take offense, but that's me.

More later, but briefly, I started work in GIS at a
cadastral mapping shop. For better or worse (probably
worse), many parcel shapefiles are regularly 100MB to
600MB in size; it's not just geometry, but many
attribute fields where people have unfortunately
chosen inappropriate defaults of 255 for character
fields--making shapefiles enormous.

Still, for basic data exploration and discovery, I
don't think newcomers should have the burden of:

1) Importing into an RDBMS before playing
2) Fixing improperly sized column data types

Thanks again for the insights. Looking forward to
more, if not here then elsewhere.

Cheers,

   Dana






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