Categories in FreeGIS.org

[Silke Reimer]

Hallo!

For quite a while now I read or hear from time to time that FreeGIS.org is 
great but that it is very difficult for newbies to get an overview over Free 
GIS Software. Often it is argued that this is due to the number of entries in 
FreeGIS.org. In my opinion this must not necessarily be the case. FreeGIS.org 
has already the concept of categorization to organize the entries. I think 
though that 
 - some of the categories have to be reorganized to be helpful (see proposal 
below for more detail)
- For several entries the categories have to be reconsidered. I think for 
example of PostGIS which is categorized as "Interactive Viewing" 
and "Misc/Fun" - quite strange in my opinion...
 
See now my proposal for the reorganization of the categories:

1. The category "applications" should be splitted into two parts 
named "functionality" and "components". 
Functionality should be splitted into 
- visulization
- digitization
- reprojection
- file format transformation
- data management
- processing
- navigation
Components could be splitted into
- desktop gis
- webgis
- database
- library
- mobile gis

2.  A category about OGC should be introduced that has for each OGC 
specification a single sub-category. One could even consider to have two 
sub-categories, one for the server side and one for the client side. But that 
is perhaps too much.

My questions to you:
1) Do you think that this reorganization is helpful?
2) I assume that my list of sub categories is not complete. Which items are 
missing?

If we agree that a reorganization of the categories is helpful I would 
volunteer to do this step. This would mean 
a) to intoduce the categories together with their subcategories. This step is 
not problem with the FreeGIS.org portal.
b) to categorize every single entry according to the new categories. This is 
of course a lot of work but still feasible through the administration portal. 
The problem: The list of updates will be crowded by a lot of entries just for 
recategorization. So my question is whether there are better means to do the 
this tasks.

Many greetings,

	Silke