Re: some GIS links and comments

[James Macgill]

At 08:58 PM 1/20/98 -0800, Catherine Dibble wrote:
>hi Alex and GIS Swarm folks,
>
>You can find a handy list of GIS software packages at:
>http://triton.cms.udel.edu/~vinton/gis_gip/gis_gip_list.html
>
>I'd suggest looking most closely at:
>
>Arc/Info, from ESRI
>http://www.esri.com
>the industry leader, for better or worse with respect to
>cost and ease of Swarm interoperability.  (AMLs and/or
>AVENUE only if you want Arc/Info to take control...)

Arc/Info is certainly the main tool here in education due
to some agreements with esri making it relatively cheep.
As far as I know however AVENUE, whilst being far nicer (and
faster than AML) is only for use with ArcView.
Other esri technologies may be worth a look, MapObjects for
example allows easy links to most programing languages, but I
think its use of ActiveX ties it to Micro$oft.

The only GIS (if you can call it that) that is used here extensively
that has not been mentioned so far is MapInfo, however its Spatial
Analysis and Raster capabilities are quite limited.

>>  Here's some ideas totally off the top of my head - in increasing
>>  order of unlikelihood and vaporousness :-)
>>
>>  * totally-decoupled: 
>>  * loosely-coupled:
>>  * highly-coupled:
>
>There is an enormous literature on integration and interoperability
>between GIS and complementary analytical and modeling software.
>See, for example, papers in GIS/LIS Conference Proceedings or
>_GIS World_, and NCGIA Technical Papers (online list available at:
>http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/publications.html), especially Initiative 6.
>
>Two things to note:
>
>(a) It isn't necessarily a choice between decoupled, loosely-coupled,
>OR highly-coupled, so much as a question of obvious stages, and then
>how far it's worth to push the coupling process (I heartily second 80/20
here).

I feel the level of coupling is a side issue that it is all to easy to get
tied
up in, lets see what we want the tool to do first.
I do note however, that there is the possibility that swarm may be moving
towards
a Java implementation (or have I got this wrong?) whilst at the same time
some GIS technologies (including those from esri) may also be moving in the
same
direction, if this happens we should find the coupling issue far easier to
deal
with.

As for my own research, I do not yet use swarm, though I do use my own swarms
and agents to explore spatial data for evidence of patters and clusters.
  If you have a Java 1.1 browser you can find one at :
  http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/pgrads/j.macgill/gis.html

Cheers James.

p.s. I only wish that I could see you all at swarmfest but I just don't
have the budget :-(



-- 
James Macgill
Centre for Computational Geography
School of Geography - Leeds University
Spell Checker (c) Creative spelling inc. (AKA my dyslexic brain)

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