[seek-kr-sms] uDIG: free replacement for ArcMap and possibledevelopments

[Jianting Zhang]

Hi, sergey:

Thanks for introducing UDIG for me. The GIS mapping functions are pretty
much standardized now and it is good to see more and more open source GIS
are coming (unfortunately, which means little room for academic research :-)

I'm familiar with JUMP (which is somewhat closely related to UDIG). A tool I
have developed for SEEK is built on top of JUMP
(ftp://ftp.lternet.edu/pub/outgoing/jzhang/doc/GBDExpV02.doc). What I like
DGIS is that it uses Eclipse RCP and use Geotools to support projection. 


One caution is the library dependences and the size of the package. A quick
search indicated that all the jar files in the SDK total about 60 Megabytes
which may add considerable complexity to any existing system. Another
comment is that, UDIG, just like JUMP is a client mapping package and does
not have many spatial analysis functions. 

While UDIG is newer than JUMP, JUMP is more self-contained and all the
libraries it need is less than 4M. I believe it has all the functions you
need. As am example, you may download the old version of the prototype I
have developed and have a quick look.
(ftp://ftp.lternet.edu/pub/outgoing/jzhang/taxonvis/taxonvis.zip). What you
need to do is unzip the downloaded file and go to "lib" directory and run
"runme.bat". All data are included as well. 

We may have further discussions for the pros/cons of different GIS systems.
I will provide more comments after I look into the source codes of UDIG. 

Thanks again

Jianting


-----Original Message-----
From: seek-kr-sms-bounces at ecoinformatics.org
[mailto:seek-kr-sms-bounces at ecoinformatics.org] On Behalf Of Sergey Krivov
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 9:59 AM
To: seek-kr-sms at ecoinformatics.org
Subject: [seek-kr-sms] uDIG: free replacement for ArcMap and
possibledevelopments


Jianting and others,

In case you have not seen it, here is a newly developed GIS system, based on
geotools and commited to OGC standards:

http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Home

This intends to be used as a free source replacement for ArcMap. The
interesting feature of uDIG is that it could easily fetch GIS data from
remote WMS servers, database connection and local files and make a single
Map project out of that. And this is accomplished by drag and drop.

In ecosystem services project where I am involved I have to develop a GIS
application which should help user to select geographic area of interest and
then fetch the data for a specific model of ecosystem service dynamics from
remote and local sources, then connect the data to spatial variables and
export them for the use within the model. We will use uDIG and I wonder if
something like this may be of use inside Kepler?

uDIG is evolving project, there are visions to add to it a 3D view aka
google earth. I think after release of java version of WorldWind, which was
planed for the end of this months this would be easy.  

sergey

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