Daniel, yes, I am definitely more interested in the educational
aspect of the comparison than the performance which
I think would be very difficult to measure because accuracy and
quality of the results (whatever that means)
may be as important as speed, if not more.
I have been promising Charlie to put this under OSGeo Edu svn for a
long time, but I keep updating
and improving it so it is never finished - I guess it will never be
so I may as well upload it. I have created
NCSU directory there and we started a coastal lidar data analysis
tutorial -
http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/education/UnderDevelopment/
(see more about the edu svn here http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/
Subversion_edu_instructions)
I will upload some of the course material and we can try to add a
MapWindow solution?
We can do two topics for a start, e.g.
Buffers and cost surfaces
Flow routing and watershed analysis
The power point slides for relevant lectures explain the tasks and
show some example results.
I used plain text for the assignment tasks to make it manageable and
easy to update
and it seems that the students are OK with it and can follow the GUI
procedure for ArcGIS.
I use screen capture only where I feel it is absolutely necessary,
e.g. for visualization with nviz.
I will let you know when I upload it,
Helena
On Dec 22, 2009, at 4:49 PM, Daniel Ames wrote:
Helena, perhaps we should move this discussion to the EDU list,
since this side by side comparison you have done could be expanded
to include multiple desktop applications and would be fantastic to
have as an educational tool. Perhaps we can copy your exercises on
a WIKI page and then encourage other teams to post solutions using
other desktop apps where they can? Then we'd all have this as a
resource to use in classes... - Dan
On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Helena Mitasova
<hmit...@unity.ncsu.edu> wrote:
I have numerous examples of gis tasks done side-by-side in GRASS
and ArcGIS here:
http://courses.ncsu.edu/mea582/lec/001/GIS_anal_assign/
GIS_Anal_Assignall.html
The data for the examples are available as GRASS data location and
ArcGIS geodatabase
(links on top of the document)
as well as in shape and ArcGRID format (I could not get all rasters
convert correctly to GeoTIFF
at the time I was preparing the data) here
http://www.grassbook.org/data_menu3rd.php
It certainly does not cover everything (especially vector data and
database examples are very limited)
but there is plenty to show various aspects of GIS from simple
display and visualization to complex
analysis.
It would be interesting to see some of these examples done in other
systems - we tried QGIS but that ended up
using GRASS plugin too much, so other more independent software
would be more interesting.
I will be updating the material in next few months to capture the
latest developments and plan
to add another course with examples in different software packages
in fall.
I am sure there will be a lot of interest here to see how at least
some of the tasks are executed
in MapWindows of gvSIG and also extension of this material to cover
more vector / database
and image processing material.
Feel free to use the data, the examples are various modifications
of the examples from the GRASbook,
Helena
Helena Mitasova
Associate Professor
Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
North Carolina State University
1125 Jordan Hall
NCSU Box 8208
Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/
email: hmit...@unity.ncsu.edu
ph: 919-513-1327 (no voicemail)
fax 919 515-7802
On Dec 22, 2009, at 3:19 PM, Stefan Steiniger wrote:
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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Daniel P. Ames, Ph.D. PE
Associate Professor, Geosciences
Idaho State University - Idaho Falls
amesd...@isu.edu
geology.isu.edu
www.hydromap.com
www.mapwindow.org
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