Scenario: Since times immemorial CAD drawings have been used in all kinds of Civil Engineering works. CAD offered lot of advantages to a user - to work on large amount of data in less time, easy storage and retrieval, more accuracy, easy editing, options to duplicate and so on. Only thing CAD drawings lacked is intelligence. By this I mean, each CAD entity is not connected to another one at all. If there is one highway and another village road, both are placed in different layers and their intersection can be seen but cannot be used for analysis like traffic flow. As they aren’t connected if highway is moved other road stays where it is. On the other hand GIS which came in at a later stage did not have these disadvantages. GIS too organized data in layers, but layers possessed intelligence. There was connectivity between elements and analysis could be easily carried out. To add more, GIS came along with facility to define the geographic location(Nowadays, even AutoCAD has this facility) which meant that the data could be overlaid on any world map!
Hi, I'm Chethan — a Cloud Architect writing about software, personal finance, telecom, and automobiles.
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Good news! ArcGIS 10 is released now and available for download (Conditions apply!)!
As a student I have always striven to keep in touch with the latest software in the domain of GIS, office suite, open source software and so on. Almost all the software vendors have a very liberal policy regarding their software at least for testing purposes. It may be ERDAS, Microsoft, FME and so on. All these companies are ready to provide a beta/trial release for free to any user. They insist on registering, which is good, as they can keep track of number of downloads etc. This way I have used ERDAS Imagine 2010, Microsoft Office 2010 beta, FME Desktop 2010(still using) and many more.
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This time I have decided to write something new. Its a book review now.
In this post I am writing about the book, “Introduction to Geographic Information Systems”, fourth edition by Kang-tsung Chang. I have used this book as my reference book throughout my first year of M.Tech study. The book covers each and every aspect of GIS in great detail and in a very sequential manner. The author’s simple way of explaining the concepts impressed me a lot.
Whatever be the topic you want to understand in the GIS domain, its a good book to begin with. The book explains almost everything. Coordinate systems are explained in the beginning followed by georelational and object-based vector data models. Topics like data input, attribute data input and management are dealt in great detail. The chapters which I liked the most were terrain mapping and analysis, and geocoding and dynamic segmentation.
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In my earlier article I had mentioned about AvisMap Deskpro demonstration at our college. I will try to give an exposure to the noteworthy features of the software package.
The software has a simple-to-use interface which will enable one to learn to use it effectively at a faster rate. The software like any other GIS Software has common functionalities to edit, query and process the spatial data. It also includes advanced capabilities like 3D modeling and ability to connect to large-scale spatial databases. According to the company website (http://www.avismap.com/home/avismap-deskpro.html) it can be used in land management, forestry, electric power, telecom, traffic, city pipe network, resource management, environmental analysis, tourism, irrigation, aeronautics, military, and other fields that require map processing.
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Two days back we had an image processing and GIS software demonstration by an eminent software distributor at our institution. The software demonstrated were PG-Steamer by Pixoneer Geomatics, AvisMap Deskpro and Skyline TerraExplorer Pro.
In this post, I will try to bring out key points of the presentation. I will concentrate on PG-Steamer in this post and other two will appear in my next post. We were convinced after looking at the software that PG Steamer will lead the image processing software market in near future.