Hei Dan,
thanks for the thoughts - I like them too and thats what I see too.. we
need not only to bring up the highlights between FOSGIS but even more to
convince people to eventually have a look on FOSGIS by comparing it to
ESRIs desktop software, since they have set a bit the standards (at
least for teaching higher level geography GIS courses).
But two notes: I doubte that ESRI has 80% because this would mean the
utility market is not considered. And I think one talks here more about
ESRI in a gegraphical analysis perspective. While I am not sure what the
average GIS user actually does (i.e. How many do queries, do editing, do
"real" analysis?).
I like your subquestions - and allow me to add comments :)
And the three main sub-questions are:
Can I open the same files?
well.. on the c-tribe side yes thanks to Gdal/OGR? But i would restrict
to core file types (shp, dxf, mif, raster stuff)
Can I make the same maps?
uuhmmm - not yet, but...?
Can I do the same analyses?
With Sextante probably yes, now.
Can I teach the same lessons?
Ahh.. that hits a point. As we need to tell students about "this open
source stuff". I actually plan to check out the next days if I can
replace some arcgis analysis tools with sextante for a course.
So maybe we check what is taugth in the GIS core curriculum?
Something like the MS thesis about GRASS and ArcGIS that was mentioned,
but web-based and updated by the various project members.
Sounds good and its great if you would have even student resources.
I actually tried to do such comparison already in my second publication
on GIS in landscape ecology and in my last talks - my result was: Most
of the FOS desktop GIS are on the ArcView level and a bit beyond, but we
can not compete with ArcInfo (leave a side the need for an easy map
making tool - not sure how good the last QGIS tool is). So by now I see
our chance in providing "specialist" tools for target groups that are
either too small for ESRI, Pitney Bowes & Intergraph & Co to be ever
included in their official distribution or that may be to expensive to
be bought as extension for some (I remember a friend who once needed
Maplex for labeling but not the rest of ArcGIS ArcInfo analysis
features). And we would need to highlight which whose things are.
here a link to that pub:
http://www.geo.uzh.ch/~sstein/finalpub/steiniger_geographic_information_tools_ecoinf2009.pdf
stefan
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