[Freegis-list] Paper on the pieces of a free gis.

[Adrian Vance Custer]

Hello everyone,

> Adrian, would it be possible for you to put the text as html pages
> somewhere on a server? We can place it on the FreeGIS server if you like,
> but I would need something else than PDF format.

The paper is up as a .pdf file at 

http://nopause.berkeley.edu/gnugis/

I'll work on learning docbook and getting this re-written as an sgml file
and posted as html.



> To my mind there will never be 'the one and only ultimate free GIS'.

Yes, this is becoming more and more apparent as many uses of gis (simple
mapping, routing) are already being catered to by simple java programs on
the web.

My personal kick is ecological analysis and we need a lot more power to
do that effectively. Then writing the power so that ecologists can use it
will be another challenge.

> This essentially means that we should make existing stuff act as
> (forgive me this fancy word) components.

What this will take, I believe, is to lay out functional limits and define
API layers to isolate one function from another.  That's what I'll put my
mind to when I get to work again.  Wasted a day re-installing Linux from
scratch-a year of upgrading had finally made the system unusable. Wow,
gnome has progressed in the past year! VERY COOL. :-)

ciao,
adrian