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posted by
LaminatorX
on Thursday February 27 2014, @07:03PM
from the All-roads-lead-to-where-now? dept.
from the All-roads-lead-to-where-now? dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes:
"Good news, everyone! A brand-new version of QGIS has been released (changelog). QGIS, a full-featured GPL-licensed GIS program has been under active development for twelve years and is now at version 2.2. Funded by a wide range of organizations, the QGIS project lets users create professional-quality maps that compete well with the output of established proprietary GIS packages like ArcView and MapInfo. Notable features of the program include its support for a wide range of file formats, modular design, map server, web publishing, as well as easy python scripting, and an extensive python plugin library.
For those interested, versions are available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Windows, MacOS X, and Android here."
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QGIS 2.2 Released!
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(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 27 2014, @09:52PM
GIS is based on layering georeferenced data, either vector data or raster data.
Vector data is composed of points, lines, and polygons. Vector files contain one or more elements. Each element can have an arbitrary number of attributes. Attributes are either strings or numbers.
Vector data can be filtered and displayed based on its attributes. For example, you might have a vector file with strings that represent roads. Each element could have a 'Name' field, a 'Class' field with either "Primary" or "Secondary", and a 'Surface' field with either "Paved" or "Unpaved". You could then filter your data to only show Primary roads, or display Paved and Unpaved roads with different symbols (solid lines and dashed lines, for example), or display the Name of the roads in text on your map.
Vector data can either be displayed as a simple georeferenced image, or be used as a kind of bitmap. So, a scanned copy of a regular map can be brought into the software as a layer. Or, a georeferenced bitmap of, say, 1m^2 elements representing elevation can be brought in. Again, the software can filter and alter display based on attributes, so that elevation file can be filtered to show everything > 100m in elevation, or colour-code the points with a standard heatmap, for example.
QGIS lets you create your own vector information and edit existing vector information, as well as perform calculations based on your data, so it can get more advanced, but basically you have program that can layer data like Photoshop and query/filter like a database.