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FreeGIS Project Makes Mapping Better 47

Posted by timothy from the 40-40.037N-073-59.347W dept.
Bernhard Reiter writes: "The FreeGIS-CD's sixth edition (v1.1.0) adds geographic information processing capabilities to major GNU/Linux distributions. Hey a couple of centuries ago maps were only for the very powerful, now you have the data on your GNU-system." With hundreds of thousands if not millions of consumer GPS units in the U.S. alone, adding hyper-local information (like individuals' landmarks) to freely available online databases of GIS information will keep making the world a bit smaller. And since most GPS units come with Windows- (and sometimes Mac-) only software, especially useful for those with Other Operating Systems.
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FreeGIS Project Makes Mapping Better More

FreeGIS Project Makes Mapping Better

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  • Re:40-40.037N-073-59.347W (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    No. You're thinking of 40-40.037N-073-59.347E. In the Western hemisphere, the Dancin'est Hemisphere in the World, those coordinates go to New York City [xerox.com]. Don't believe me? Too bad. I'm right.

  • GPS maps for Linux (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is a shameless plug for a program I'm writing that will display real-time moving maps from a linux laptop connected to a gps.

    Gnomad - GPS Street Map Viewer for Linux FreeBSD NetBSD OpenBSD [gnomad-mapping.com]

    screenshots [gnomad-mapping.com]

    Gnomad uses the latest year 2000 data from the gov, the only problem is figuring how to sqeeze it into a small number of CD's without throwing away any information.

    -wolfgang

  • Unless things have changed drastically since last I looked (six months ago) these maps from ESRI aren't exactly free. Especially for commerical interests. So make sure you look into the license that ESRI puts on that data before you commit to it. (and BTW after they are done massaging the data it isn't that good either).

    All this data comes from the US Census. If I remember right Bruce Perens has a mirror of the data on his web server. The data is essentially a dump of their database, and isn't too hard to put back together. I wouldn't suggest getting the data direct from the census, since they charge around $500 shipping and handling
  • Does it include street addresses, township section and ranges, and zip codes(very us centric). If it does I then I could see myself using this.
  • Arc shapefiles are propietary, but, since they are XML-based they can be imported easily.
    --
    Claim your namespace.
  • gpsd supports the DeLorme Earthmate. I tried to go to the gpsd homepage via freshmeat but it appears to have moved. Probably quicker to just grab the tar.gz or apt-get it and read the docs.
  • http://freegis.org/FreeGIS_CD/freegis_cd.en.html [freegis.org]

    It uses GRASS along with GMT, iGMT, gmap, mapserver, MapIt!, gpsman, etc... Basically appears to be a distribution of all the mapping/gps stuff and some data. You can go download everything seperately. You can't download thier ISO image.

  • I think selectspec was thinking more of a map that could be clicked on and enlarged. Kind of like that 3d global map that Hiro had in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I can't be the only one who read about it there and paused to imagine the possibilities! Holding something like that in your palm would be simply awesome. It even had the weather system represented (if I recall correctly).
  • Doh! This should have been a reply to post #13. That's what I get for posting without my contacts in...
  • I think this is something that has been lacking for quite some time. I have experience in the GIS packages from ESRI (ArcInfo, ArcView, etc), which are decidedly NOT free, and I've always wondered if there was a decent free alternative to it.

    This looks to be a step in the right direction, and it looks, from the homepage, that there is still much development being done.

    What I wonder is if the data is easy to get to. I cant remember if we had to pay for the USGS data or not...

    Lots of smaller cities are starting to use heavy duty GIS to help manage their public services. For example there is a city in colorado (Ft. Morgan) who are using ArcInfo and a load of other addons to provide field workers with data about specific power line segments, and they even have WAP functionality so they can enter data from their palmpilots!

    I think there is yet to be a real big interest in this type of databasing/mapping, which is too bad. there is so much cool stuff you can accomplish with these types of tools, and it looks like FreeGIS is helping make it widely available.
  • Here are a couple of other interesting geodata sources:

    National Weather Service AWIPS Map Database Catalog
    http://isl715.nws.noaa.gov/mapdata/newcat/ [noaa.gov]
    All Sorts of U.S. ditigal map data in Shapefile format.

    GOES Imagery On-line at NASA-GSFC
    http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/text/0readme.html [nasa.gov]
    http://rsd.gsfc.nasa.gov/goes/ [nasa.gov]
    http://www1.etl.noaa.gov/climsat/realtime.html [noaa.gov]
    Your basic weather satellite data - get the latest imagery.

    Virtual Terrain Project
    http://vterrain.org/index.html [vterrain.org]
    Another interesting open source project ...

    DGPS corrections over the Internet
    http://www.wsrcc.com/wolfgang/gps/dgps-ip.html [wsrcc.com]
    Of interest to GPS users. Neat!

  • Yes, this US Census map data is probably good enough for producing detailed maps in most cases (unless you want to get down to the detail of every pothole and fire hydrant) - that was its intent (detailed street maps down to the block face for census purposes). However, there are some caveats for using this data. An important issue is that this TIGER data is certainly not updated very frequently and I suspect it reflects roadways circa 1999 when the digital map data was finalized. In urban areas such details are constantly changing. Keeping such data up-to-date is expensive. Commercial companies tend to keep on top of this (although my experience with the various on-line mapping web sites is that they don't!). This TIGER data lacks other information, such as the nature of the roads (e.g., one-way, multi-lane, nature of intersections, etc.) that would be useful in producing real-time or interactive driving maps.
  • Sounds like this would be a great starting spot for an OpenStreetMap project. Certainly we could make better maps than mapquest or mapblast, and certainly keep them more accurate. I'd start something like this, but I know I don't have anywhere near the time and energy needed to get something like this going. :-(

    ---
  • Does anybody know if the DeLorme Earthmate is supported by any of these apps/libraries?

    I know the Earthmate doesn't use the standard GPS information format, but instead some binary, proprietary Rockwell (?) format. The fact that my GPS would become a paperweight is about the only thing keeping me from installing Linux on my laptop.


    --
  • In case anybody is wondering, those coordinates put you somewhere in the "left half" of Kyrgyzstan, which borders China and Kazakhstan.

    :)

    --
  • Oops. My bad. :)


    --

  • GIS (Score:1)

    by joekool ( 21359 )
    Yes!--Free the Geeks in Space!!

  • Re:online database for Games (Score:3)

    by timster ( 32400 ) on Saturday June 09, 2001 @06:43AM (#164331)
    Mapmakers figured out ways to enforce their copyrights a long time ago. Usually any map will have some very small, mostly irrelevant distortions -- like perhaps the driveway of the cartographer will be shown on the map as "Fred Lane". It's pretty simplistic but if you see "Fred Lane" on any other map, then it must be a pirated map.
  • You should look at the source for Xtraceroute [chalmers.se], a program which plots the location of "hops" in a traceroute on a 3-D globe. Once you mix it with this innovative, free (as in speech!) GIS solution, you should be able to realize the power of Open Source.
  • Well, GPS has been a topic of frequent [slashdot.org] discussion here on Slashdot. Of note, the degredation of civilian users was turned off [slashdot.org] last year.
  • Where do I get world files for the maps that ESRI draws?? Without world files, the maps are useless to a GIS application.
    -russ
  • And pygps supports gpsd. It's got moving maps, and logging.
    -russ
  • pygps interfaces to your gps receiver via gpsd (see freshmeat). Once it's talking to your gps receiver, it shows you which satellites it's receiving, how well it's receiving them, and shows you your lat/lon easting/northing location. You can log your track for later playback, mark waypoints as you go, and view your location on maps.

    It's designed to run on the Linux iPAQ, so it supports 320x240, 240x320, and 1024x768 screens, automagically selecting the right one for your screen resolution.

    It doesn't create any maps, but instead selects the best available map from maps you've entered into its database.

    It's listed on freshmeat.
    -russ
  • Is it open source? I want to rip off bits for pygps. Gonna have to write a data stripper so that the data set will fit on an iPAQ.
    -russ
  • It looks like the project offers the 1997 TIGER line files for U.S. roadways. The 2000 data, for any interested, is available from www.census.gov as well as documentation on how to interpret it (it's a bunch of text files, one line per record with fixed-width fields. a nuisance to work with). The data is good enough for producing basic maps, but it's not detailed enough to produce the kinds of street maps you'd use in RL. Street data of that caliber is only available commercially, I think. (If somebody knows otherwise, please respond!)
  • We have a node set up in an OGC distributed data trial and it rocks. A user at a broker site can integrate layers from a pile of contributing sites without needing to know where they are and who maintains them.

    In terms of comptetioitn, we have also been looking at ESRI's ArcIMS, but IMHO Mapserver is no less clunky than ArcIMS.

    All of them IMHO have really ugly, clunky user interfaces. I think people are pre-occupied with implementing a GUI GIS in a web browser without thinking about just how practical it is.

    Xix.
  • And since most GPS units come with Windows- (and sometimes Mac-) only software, especially useful for those with Other Operating Systems.

    While it's true that GPS manufacturers typically include Windows software with their units, you definitely aren't restricted to only using their software.

    Nearly all GPS receivers will send NMEA data out via serial port, which is a nice simple ASCII location stream.

    Further, most, if not all, manufacturers publish their other communication protocols for things like retrieving waypoints to a computer.

    The software that is included with the unit is usually extremely basic, and the manufacturer relies on other software developers to implement support for their protocol within more advanced programs.

  • I wonder how close to a target some of these software can actually get. I know with just about all (if not all) GPS devices, the government in the United States does not allow them to have pinpoint accuracy out of fear it would compromise military positions.

    For those who don't want to download something like this may I suggest Cartome [cartome.org], which is Cryptome's [cryptome.org] companion that deals with mapping. They have a slew of links about products, free online services, etc.
  • Since you asked, here is a shameless plug:

    We are producing and selling a maritime GIS application which makes highly detailed seafloor maps by way of GPS and echosounder data. The software is only available for Linux, but is not free. See www.olex.no for details.

    Another poster asked about free vector map data. As far as maritime maps go, the really useful data are fairly expensive; their data formats, such as S57 and C-Map CM93, are comprehensive and difficult to handle, often needing NDAs to be obtained.

    -- Ole B. Hestvik, Olex AS, Norway
  • I've been wanted to start game project for a worldwide Illuminati multiplayer game, but I had a hard time tracking down free map vector data to base the game from. This sounds like a potential spot. The main screen of the game was a 3D view of the globe, so you can see how it was important. I've been waiting for something like this for a while now.

  • You could try the Virtual Terrain Project, or the pretty funky terraform [sourceforge.net] artificial terrain generator. Steal the algorithms from terraform and you could generate maps galore. E-mail me if you want any help.

  • What leads you to believe that the ESRI maps are free? The pages say "Copyright ESRI" on them, and there is nothing that indicates that you are free to copy them. And downloading data costs money.

    Am I missing something? Just because something is on the Internet doesn't make it free.

  • it costs $US25.00 for just the software, $US45.00 if you include the manual (in German). So, this is not free as in "free beer"
    But it's free as in "free speech", which is much more important. The $/EUR 25 cover only little more than the cost of creating the CDs and shipping them. The money Intevation actually makes from selling the CDs goes back into the FreeGIS project and Free Software.

    Furthermore, all the software and data on the CD is also available for free (well actually for whatever the download costs you) on various web-sites, all of which are linked from the FreeGIS project [freegis.org].

    Disclaimer: I work for Intevation, but this post only reflects my personal opinions.

  • I work with GIS professionally (ARC/Info), so it's refreshing to see an open source GIS package.

    There are tons and tons of FREE DATA out there for you to grab and peruse. One caveat, most data will be proprietary formats, such as ARC export, ARC shapefiles, ERDAS, and others. SDTS (spatial data transfer standard) is "open" but a pain in the neck to use. I note with glee that FreeGIS has conversion tools for all these formats.

    Some places to start your search for FREE GEO DATA, places that I found very handy:

    Hopefully, this'll get you on your way. Good luck, and have fun!
  • I thought GRASS only ran on Unix platforms...
    --

  • An honest question: the CD contains geographic data (e.g. rivers, coastline, etc.) but I saw no mention in the article or web site of the availability of political data (e.g. streets, city, state, country, etc.) Is there a free (beer) source of this info that is EASILY integrated with this CD?

    Also, an observation, though it's called "FreeGIS", according to the order form: http://freegis.org/order.en.html [freegis.org], it costs $US25.00 for just the software, $US45.00 if you include the manual (in German). So, this is not free as in "free beer".

  • GRASS has been available for GNU/Linux for some time. In fact, at my work we use GRASS with SUSE Linux rather than the SUN Workstations that we have because of the superior speed.
  • Adding hyper-local information (like individuals' landmarks) to freely available online databases of GIS information will keep making the world a bit smaller.

    Individuals' landmarks? Does this mean that the exact location of the hairy mole on my left buttock will show up online? Oh Brave New World! Vive le Linux!

  • GRASS has been freely available (GPL'd) for many years and has been continuously upgraded. Grass is Unix based, runs in Linux as well as others including windows. It provides both raster as well as vector capabilities. So why write a new one? For more on GRASS check out one of the mirror sites: US [baylor.edu]
    Germany [uni-hannover.de]
    Japan [osaka-cu.ac.jp]
    (There are other mirrors as well). Billy The Mountain

  • http://www.openmap.net/
  • I did this app [mysask.com] for a client [mysask.com]. I think that the interface for a raster (no java, plugin or activeX) based page is pretty good.

    The client [mysask.com] is the local yellow pages provider and provincial gov. phone company.
    It was a little tough to implement with Mapguide LiteView, because there was no functionality to draw the feature for the business. What I ended up doing is a custom servlet that gets the map from liteview, with a LL->UTM conversion (the features are stored in LL, but liteview needs a bounding box in the projection it is drawing in).

    The idea of the map is just to locate businesses, without the user downloading any sort of thick client, so the full MapGuide plugin/ActiveX was not usefull. They don't have all of the businesses located yet, but if you search for 'pizza' in the business category [mysask.com] then click on any address, you should get a map.

    I tried to keep the UI as clean as possible.




    Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
    Make doooooobieees?

  • Mapserver [umn.edu] included on the cd is a great open-source raster delivery mapserver. It does have it's limits, mainly that it is CGI based, so database connections and memory caching are limited by the design, but if you want to put up a web page for a small to medium volume site, it is fairly easy to set up, and will work with any webserver. I have an app I built for a client about 3 years ago with it, and it has worked out well.

    I implement Autodesk Mapguide [autodesk.com] for a living, and Mapserver is very close in features and performs comparably to Mapguide with the LiteView extension.

    I looked at the GRASS package for a bit, and it is very complicated, even for someone who does GIS professionally.
    If you want to do basic GIS manipulation, get a copy of ArcView, MapInfo or Autocad Map.

    FME from Safe Software [safe.com] is a fantastic converter for most data formats, and has an 15 day trial.
    It rocks.




    Whatcha doooo with those rollin' papers?
    Make doooooobieees?

  • Free vetcor map data? Good luck!

    Actually GMT [hawaii.edu] has been around for several years, runs fine on Linux, and is GPL. It includes very detailed coastline data, as well as other geographic data, including political boundaries. A very useful source of freely usable maps. All in all, a really impressive product. I've been using it for a couple of years now.

  • Free vetcor map data? Good luck!
    You're absolutely right, I know, I've been looking for public digital maps myself, but it seems impossible to get some of decent quality. And maps = expensive as hell. That's got to change, it's only data after all, and I happen to agree with the FSF [fsf.org]when it comes to data. When everyone has a GPS module, public map data of high quality may become a possibility.

    Of course, a much faster way is simply pirating these maps. Once map data is avaliable, it's very hard to say "that is OUR map data!" since, well, the terrain lies there.
  • Socio-economic/political data like boundaries, districts, and streets is geographic. If location is involved, its geographic, regardless of the type of content. Even zipe codes and phone numbers have a geographic component, although most people deal with them only as tabular or attribute data.

    As far as using the socio-economic data, most of it is in a vector format. GRASS, the most popular Free GIS, deals mostly with image/raster data.
  • There is a big big difference between maps and a GIS. With maps you can find your way (maybe), with a GIS you can plot cruise missile courses, delineate ideal habitat for pandas etc, and snoop on your industrial competitors via satellite imagery, and much much more. Get a klue.

  • Re:online database for Games (Score:3)

    by lazroze ( 458815 ) on Saturday June 09, 2001 @06:44AM (#164360)
    Free vector maps of the world: From ESRI: http://www.esri.com/data/online/quickmap.html Digital Chart of the World: http://www.maproom.psu.edu/dcw/ You'll probably have to tack together to get what you want. The FREE GIS package can handle all this data no problem and export as you like. If this is all a bitch, email me and I'll try to help you out, like pro bono and all. Anything for video games. Anything.

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