Distributed Urban Information Systems

[Paul Paryski]

Idrisi, a sophisticated and professional GIS program, is available from  
Clark University, Nick's academic home, for much less than ARC View.   Idrisi is
much easier to use than ArcView.
_www.clarklabs.org/products_ (http://www.clarklabs.org/products)
 
Paul



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[Parks, Raymond]

PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
> Idrisi, a sophisticated and professional GIS program, is available from
> Clark University, Nick's academic home, for much less than ARC View.
> Idrisi is much easier to use than ArcView.

  However, I am not willing to make a minimum $1250 investment without
some chance at a preview or test of the product.  BTW, finding that cost
turned out to be much more difficult than it should be on that web-site.
 The web-site seems to further the stereotype of academics not having a
clue about business.

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
Consilient Heuristician     Voice:505-844-4024
ATA Department              Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288
http://www.sandia.gov/redteam2007

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Raymond Parks wrote:

> PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
>  
>> Idrisi, a sophisticated and professional GIS program, is available from
>> Clark University, Nick's academic home, for much less than ARC View.
>> Idrisi is much easier to use than ArcView.
>>    
>
>   However, I am not willing to make a minimum $1250 investment without
> some chance at a preview or test of the product.  BTW, finding that cost
> turned out to be much more difficult than it should be on that web-site.
>  The web-site seems to further the stereotype of academics not having a
> clue about business.
>  

Btw, ArcView's capabilities are exposed as COM interfaces (called
`ArcObjects') and programming ArcView in Visual Basic is not hard.  
There are accessible books on the topic.

A related technology that may be of interest is the open source PostGis
project.  This adds geographical proximity extensions to SQL (Postgres).

Marcus

[George Duncan]

May I suggest the book by my colleagues Wil Gorr and Kristen Kurland here at
Carnegie Mellon. It does make ArcView seem doable. Certainly our students
here in public policy find it accessible. See
http://www.amazon.com/GIS-Tutorial-Workbook-ArcView-9-0/dp/1589481275

George


On 9/24/07, Marcus G. Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

>
> Raymond Parks wrote:
> > PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
> >
> >> Idrisi, a sophisticated and professional GIS program, is available from
> >> Clark University, Nick's academic home, for much less than ARC View.
> >> Idrisi is much easier to use than ArcView.
> >>
> >
> >   However, I am not willing to make a minimum $1250 investment without
> > some chance at a preview or test of the product.  BTW, finding that cost
> > turned out to be much more difficult than it should be on that web-site.
> >  The web-site seems to further the stereotype of academics not having a
> > clue about business.
> >
> Btw, ArcView's capabilities are exposed as COM interfaces (called
> `ArcObjects') and programming ArcView in Visual Basic is not hard.
> There are accessible books on the topic.
>
> A related technology that may be of interest is the open source PostGis
> project.  This adds geographical proximity extensions to SQL (Postgres).
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

--
George T. Duncan
Professor of Statistics
Heinz School of Public Policy and Management
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
[phone]
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[Stephen Guerin]

Thanks for the feedback, so far.

Yes, we use ArcView to a limited degree on projects and find the python and COM
scripting potentials interesting. The point of my original post is that there's
an explosion now of free GIS authoring tools and free mechanisms of GIS / 3D
distribution that it's interesting to think of completely new classes of
applications that leverage this new found freedom.

I guess it's not unlike having proprietary applications on top of proprietary
network protocols prior to the web, and then HTTP on top of TCP/IP exploded.
This happened not because the combination was 10x technically superior to what
it replaced but because the new paradigm was free and without commercial
restrictions.

Are we at a similar threshold now with GIS/3D?

-Steve

> May I suggest the book by my colleagues Wil Gorr and Kristen
> Kurland here at Carnegie Mellon. It does make ArcView seem
> doable. Certainly our students here in public policy find it
> accessible. See
> http://www.amazon.com/GIS-Tutorial-Workbook-ArcView-9-0/dp/158
> 9481275
> <http://www.amazon.com/GIS-Tutorial-Workbook-ArcView-9-0/dp/15
> 89481275>
>  
> George
>
>  
> On 9/24/07, Marcus G. Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
>
> Raymond Parks wrote:
> > PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
> >
> >> Idrisi, a sophisticated and professional GIS
> program, is available from
> >> Clark University, Nick's academic home, for much
> less than ARC View.
> >> Idrisi is much easier to use than ArcView.
> >>
> >
> >   However, I am not willing to make a minimum $1250
> investment without
> > some chance at a preview or test of the product.  
> BTW, finding that cost
> > turned out to be much more difficult than it should
> be on that web-site.
> >  The web-site seems to further the stereotype of
> academics not having a
> > clue about business.
> >
> Btw, ArcView's capabilities are exposed as COM
> interfaces (called
> `ArcObjects') and programming ArcView in Visual Basic
> is not hard.
> There are accessible books on the topic.
>
> A related technology that may be of interest is the
> open source PostGis
> project.  This adds geographical proximity extensions
> to SQL (Postgres).
>
> Marcus
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> George T. Duncan
> Professor of Statistics
> Heinz School of Public Policy and Management Carnegie Mellon
> University Pittsburgh, PA 15213
> [phone]
>

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Stephen Guerin wrote:
> Are we at a similar threshold now with GIS/3D?
>  
I haven't worked on GIS stuff lately, but I am interested in
technologies for high performance multidimensional query.   I've
experimented with some products like TimesTen from Oracle, but wish for
something like
http://www-vis.lbl.gov/Events/SC05/HDF5FastQuery/index.html but without
layering over O.S. system calls, i.e. data stored in native format with
bitmap indicies or similar to accelerate query.  

Hmm, maybe there's a market for scientific data appliances (no not file
servers!) say running some microkernel/exokernel that take remote
procedure calls over Infiniband or such?    Calls conceptually like SQL,
but intended to be way way faster...

Marcus

[Owen Densmore]

> Are we at a similar threshold now with GIS/3D?

Yes.

And I think they are intertwined .. as soon as anyone gets into 3D  
they'll want to stuff "reality" into it, and GIS is sorta where you'd  
have to start.  And GIS as just schematic, static drawings lacks the  
communication depth that GIS needs .. and finds in 3D and Modeling.

More to the point, however, in thinking GIS is on the brink of a huge  
explosion is the way it is becoming open.  If we simply had ArcGIS  
and Idrisi being replaced by GRASS, Thuban, uDig and others, that'd  
be interesting.  But they are going well beyond that.  They are  
developing APIs and libraries that are available in many languages  
(C, Java, Python) and on all platforms.  They are also becoming web  
based using new standards for web GIS servers.  And they have added  
GIS features to SQL databases.

So its not just that the tools are available.  Its that they are  
becoming a complete platform, and are moving beyond the IT/GIS  
specialties into multidisciplinary practice.

    -- Owen

[Parks, Raymond]

Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Hmm, maybe there's a market for scientific data appliances (no not file
> servers!) say running some microkernel/exokernel that take remote
> procedure calls over Infiniband or such?    Calls conceptually like SQL,
> but intended to be way way faster...

  Interestingly, the control system world has had the need you speak of
for some time.  They use "historians" which accept and catalog large
volumes of data in literal real-time, calculate derived data and store
them, and provide access in real-time for control algorithms.  The
market-leading example is Pi from OSISoft <http://www.osisoft.com/>.
They have some installations with millions of points (data sources) that
update on about a 3 second interval.  I'm not sure how that compares
with SQL based products, but they claim their product is faster.

--
Ray Parks                   rcparks at sandia.gov
Consilient Heuristician     Voice:505-844-4024
ATA Department              Mobile:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/scada Fax:[phone]
http://www.sandia.gov/idart Pager:800-690-5288
http://www.sandia.gov/redteam2007

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Raymond Parks wrote:
>   Interestingly, the control system world has had the need you speak of
> for some time.  They use "historians" which accept and catalog large
> volumes of data in literal real-time, calculate derived data and store
> them, and provide access in real-time for control algorithms.  The
> market-leading example is Pi from OSISoft <http://www.osisoft.com/>.
>  
Huh.. thanks for the pointer..   Looks like some overlap..

[Stephen Guerin]

Slashdot has a rumor bit that Google is beta-testing something in this space at
ASU:
        http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/09/25/1437249.shtml

-S