Much more than just making pretty maps and helping us get from point A to point B, GIS technologies are what allow us to plan our cities, route the infrastructure that enables everything we do, preserve our natural resources, save lives in times of disaster, and so much more. If you've ever worked with geographic data on the desktop, chances are that you used Esri's ArcGIS application in at least part of your work. ![]() ![]() Proj.4 is an open source cartograpic projection library and tool that works hidden in the most of desktop gis, spatial databases and gis service software (web stuff). Mar 4, 2018 - A List of Free Open Source Mapping Software. 1 QGIS – Formerly Quantum GIS. 3 Whitebox GAT. ArcGIS is an incredibly powerful tool, but unfortunately, it's a proprietary product that is designed for Windows. Linux and Mac users are out of luck unless they want to run ArcGIS in a virtualized environment, and even then, they're still using a closed source product that can be very expensive to license. While their flagship product is closed source, I would be remiss not to note that Esri has made to the open source community. Fortunately, GIS users have a few choices for using open source tools to design maps and work with spatial data that can be obtained under free and open source licenses and which run on a variety of different non-Windows operating systems. Let's take a look at some of the options. GRASS Let's begin with. GRASS, which stands for Geographic Resources Analysis Support System). Chrono trigger characters. It has a very long history, dating back to original development which began in 1982 under the US government. In the time since, GRASS has been adopted by the academic community, where its development continues today. I mention this history because it will help you to understand the interface, which launches with a terminal window and asks you a few questions about setting up your project before launching a separate control and display window for working with your data. If the GUI feels like it was later tacked on to a powerful program working under the hood, well, that's probably what actually happened. While the interface may not feel as intuitive to newcomers as some other GIS applications, I like it for two reasons. One, since it really is just a GUI abstraction to the underlying Python commands, advanced users can easily manipulate data and display directly from the Python console, for speed, preciseness, and importantly for academic applications, easy replicability. The second reason I like the interface is that it exposes the wide and powerful array of data manipulation tools directly. GRASS is definitely the winner when it comes to data analysis and geoprocessing, and its tools can be used from external applications, making it an extremely extensible tool which is worth learning even if you don't take it on as your primary desktop GIS system. GRASS is written primarily in C/C++, although many of its modules are written in Python or other languages. You can find its source code in Subversion repository under a GPL license. QGIS For many people, discovering is the end of their search for an ArcGIS alternative. It has a clean interface, it's easy to use, and it just works. QGIS supports a wide variety of raster and vector formats, and if you're a Linux user, there's a good chance that it's already packaged for your distribution's default repositories.
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