[Freegis-list] survey for a newbie

[Jan-Oliver Wagner]

Dear Kevin,

On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 02:32:44PM +0100, kevin.rowanet wrote:
> Could somebody give me a general survey to compare (and detail 
> connections between, them if any) :

comaprison if rather difficult if you don't have a
specification about what you plan to do.
I will give just some hints on what you listed up:


> GRASS

A full GIS for raster and vector data.
This is Free Software.
See freegis.org

> NIMAMUSE

A product of National Imagery and Mapping Agency
to work with NIMA Data.
No Free Software.

> FREEGIS (?)

A project to promote Free Software products for GIS.
Lists all known Free GIS Software and Free Geo-Data.
Links people working and developing Free GIS Software.
Your question was asked at FreeGIS :-)
FreeGIS is very strict on what is Free and what is not.

> GEOTRANS

See at freegis.org

> ARCVIEW and co

Proprietary GIS products by ESRI.

> PROJ4

See freegis.org

> AUTOCAD (for GIS)

Proprietary product.

> ADELIE and CARAIBES (Ifremer France)
Adelie = Underwater vehicle data post-processing software?
At a quick glance I would say it is no Free Software.
It is partly an extension of ArcView.

> Well... another way of asking that question is: can GRASS do for free 
> all what the others do?

No, of course. There is no software on this world that can do all of
what others can do.
Probably GRASS can help you in doing what you want to do, but you must
specify your needs.

Furthermore, it does nothing for free, it is Free Software.
Using Software always costs money (at least the staff).
But GRASS does not involve license costs if you mean that :-)

> In connection with first question, what about all small software to 
> connect GPS with a PC for visualization of movements on a map : can 
> Grass do it ?

There are some Free Software tools that are able to do that.
See freegis.org for them (seach for GPS).
They interface one way or another with GRASS.

Cheers

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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