{"id":809,"date":"2011-11-17T17:22:35","date_gmt":"2011-11-17T22:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/anthony.darrouzet-nardi.net\/scienceblog\/?p=809"},"modified":"2011-11-17T17:22:35","modified_gmt":"2011-11-17T22:22:35","slug":"open-source-gis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/?p=809","title":{"rendered":"Open source GIS"},"content":{"rendered":"

It would be awesome to have an open source GIS that works as well as R does for stats, and it looks like there almost is one. I checked out QGIS<\/a> last week and was pretty impressed. I managed to get it installed and pull some of my thesis data in there and display it without any problem. QGIS had a really nice interface and smooth operation. It couldn’t straight-up convert my .mxd files but then I wouldn’t really expect it to be able to do that. It did easily import shapefiles and raster images, and displayed x-y coordinate data.<\/p>\n

However, I quickly found a limitation, which was that I couldn’t implement the kriging procedure that was the goal of my session. I wasn’t trying to do something fancy, just a run-of-the-mill interpolation. Apparently there is some package called SDA4PP that implements a Geostatistical-Analyst-style interface, but my quest to install it quickly became a wild goose chase. Oh well. It looks to me like this type of functionality should be pretty close though.<\/p>\n

The good news was that I realized that kriging procedures are pretty easy to implement in R. The tutorial on this page<\/a> was really helpful.<\/p>\n

Nobody likes dealing with the expense and hassle of running ESRI software. I would be more sympathetic to ESRI if they had good customer service like LiCOR, but last time I tried to ask a question they had some bogus system in which I had to contact a campus representative before I could talk to them… Thus, I must conclude that they have had a good run of it over the years, but that it’s time to go Firefox\/MySQL\/R on them. It also seems like a lot could be done with a user-contribution system like R. If I knew a grad student getting into GIS, I’d tell them to go straight for open source options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It would be awesome to have an open source GIS that works as well as R does for stats, and it looks like there almost is one. I checked out QGIS last week and was pretty impressed. I managed to get it installed and pull some of my thesis data in there and display it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=809"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/809\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/scienceblog.darrouzet-nardi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}