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Aren Cambre's picture
Thu, 12/23/2010 - 17:47 — Aren Cambre

As mentioned in my previous post, I've had to learn geographical information systems in the past few months. This was mostly new to me.

I'm glad I switched to Postgres. Its GIS support is excellent thanks to PostGIS.

I had to figure out which GIS tool to use. ArcGIS is the popular answer, but it's costly. While SMU has ArcGIS licenses, it would take teeth pulling to get it installed anywhere besides computers in an academic computer lab. I have to do the vast majority of my research work at home, so that won't work. Plus, what if I wanted to go more GIS stuff after I finish my praxis? I'd rather not pay an ArcGIS license, so I turned to the open source community.

I spent a couple of weeks figuring out the open source GIS market. In short, Quantum GIS is probably the best choice for general GIS needs. GRASS GIS appeared to be a popular alternative, but it's UI is inferior, and it's included with Quantum GIS, so that just helped me choose Quantum GIS.

I'll post more later. Just choosing a GIS product was enough of a challenge!

 

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