Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Pros and Cons
Some of the pros for uDig are as follows:
• Support for a wide range of data formats
• Easy to install
• Both viewing and editing capabilities
• Extensible
And here are the cons:
• Interface is a bit nonstandard
• Some learning curve in getting up to speed on loading, symboliz-
ing, and visualizing data
• No analysis functions; however, work is underway to integrate
JGrass
14
into uDig
A.2
Command-Line Applications
Now it's time to take a look at some of the command-line applica-
tions you will find useful in your OSGIS ventures. With the advent of
“modern” GIS software, most people want to point and click their way
through life. That's good, but there is a tremendous amount of flexibil-
ity and power waiting for you with the command line. Many times you
can do something on the command line in a fraction of the time you can
do it with a GUI. The applications we'll look at next are definitely worthy
of consideration when you start stuffing gadgets into your toolbox.
GDAL/OGR
GDAL and OGR are
written in C and C++.
Let's take a look at GDAL and OGR. These two are used under the hood
in a large number of GIS applications, both open source and propri-
etary. GDAL and OGR are really libraries that provide support for a
vast number of raster and vector formats. Along with the libraries are
a suite of command-line tools to work with these formats.
Raster support is provided by the GDAL library. Most popular raster
formats are supported, including TIFF, PNG, JPEG2000, GRASS raster,
ArcInfo grid, DEM, and ECW. Some of these formats require external
libraries that are not included with GDAL (an example is ECW). If you
want to have support for one of these, you will have to download and
possibly build the dependent libraries and then compile GDAL. You
Search WWH ::
Custom Search