Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Not everyone will need or want the same tools in their toolkit. One of
the things we hope to accomplish on our journey together is to iden-
tify which tools you need and then learn how to assemble them into a
system that works for you. Ideally, you should come through the expe-
rience with some nicely integrated applications and utilities to serve
all your mapping needs on the desktop. As you assemble your toolkit,
you'll find that many applications are of the “Swiss Army knife” variety,
providing a wide range of capabilities.
1.4
Other Mapping Options
What are your other options? Well, we already mentioned them—web-
based applications. Unless you are developing your own web mapping
application, you're pretty much at the mercy of the web developer. You
must use their interface and work with the layers they provide. For
some folks, this is a perfectly good solution, and it's definitely some-
thing to consider when you are ready to share your hard work with the
rest of the world.
For those of you who need to work with local or distributed datasets
to create, edit, and display data, this isn't going to work. You will need
tools to create and maintain your data.
A solution that falls in the middle is Google Earth, now available on
Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. With Google Earth you can add and
display your own vector data, once you've converted it to the proper
format. I find that using my desktop GIS toolkit to create and prep data
for Google Earth meets my IIWUI test.
1.5
What's Ahead?
To give you an idea of where we're headed, we're next going to dive
into OSGIS and look at the whole notion of using open source for your
mapping needs. From that point on, we'll look deeper into concepts,
data, and use of the tools at our disposal. Our goal is to get you up
to speed on working with OSGIS desktop applications, and there is a
lot of ground to cover. Unfortunately, we can't give you an in-depth
tutorial for all the applications we'll use. In the appendixes you'll find
some additional information for some of them, and we'll point you to
additional resources as we go along.
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