FOSS4G Software List

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This is an overview of major free GIS software projects. It is a personal selection aiming at listing only those projects that seem to have a stable user community or have potential to establish a wider user base. The content of this page (until 2012) is part of a paper published in Computers Environment and Urban Systems: S. Steiniger and A.J.S. Hunter: "The 2012 Free and Open Source GIS Software Map – A Guide to facilitate Research, Development and Adoption" (download pdf - ver. 3.Oct.2012).

The categories of software used are based on those presented in Steiniger and Weibel (2010): "GIS software" [1].

To test some of the software below we recommend the OSGeo Live DVD (http://live.osgeo.org).

For updates to the list you can send an email to sstein=.at.=geo.uzh.ch. However, I keep myself informed by reading the SpatialTau Newsletter by James Fee.

A selection of FOS GIS Software Projects 2011

Desktop GIS

major:

others:

Spatial Data Base Managment Systems

major:

others:

NoSQL (see http://nosql-database.org/):

Server GIS (OGC WPS)

Mobile GIS and Survey Tools

viewers for smart phones:

further (mobile phone) survey applications:

Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis Software

not integrated tools:

Remote Sensing Software

Software Libraries and Extensions

Data input/output and conversion libraries

Geometry libraries

Projection libraries

Geographic data processing and analysis libraries

Other useful libraries

General Frameworks for own GIS Development

Web Map Server (OGC WMS, WFS etc.)

see also the OSGeo server benchmarking docs: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Benchmarking_2011

major:

other:

Rest-based:

MetaData and Registry

editor:

Web Map Application Development Frameworks

Map Viewer

major:

others:

3D:

General Map Application Development Frameworks (Packages)

Web Map Rendering & Tiling

serving tiles:

Complete SDI Packages

GIS 2.0 a.k.a GIS on the web

GIS 2.0 Tools and Services

Other useful tools for GIS 2.0 development

libraries:

  • D3.js - a powerful diagramming/visualisazion lib
  • Angular.js or Backbone.js - to develop Single Page Applications (SPAs)
  • React - the V(iew) in MVC develpment?
  • and node.js ... of course

development tools:

  • Coffee script for object-oriented javascript programming - coffeescript.org
  • Sublime text editor - www.sublimetext.com
  • GitLab - storing code on a local Git server.

Geospatial web data formats

Spatial Analysis and Processing in Python

A lot of desktop GIS allow to custom functions with Python: notably QGIS, gvSIG (in Jython), OpenJUMP (in Jython). However, there are couple of tools/toolboxes to look at. Maybe start with this blog entry by TalYarkoni and the comments on this blog entry when searching for some analysis tools.

  • Anaconda - a distribution of python tools, including:
    • iPython a nice web-based interface to program and comment data analysis in python
    • NumPy
    • SciPy
    • Pandas - to read data from files, subset and analyse them
    • MatplotLib
    • Bokeh
  • on the geodata side of things exist:
    • Fiona (github) - vector data processing
    • Rasterio (github) - raster data processing
    • Shapely - for manipulation and analysis of geometric objects in the Cartesian plane
    • GeoScript
    • Cartopy by the UK Met Office - which handles projections, shapefile reading, etc.
    • Iris by the UK Met Office - for analysis and viz of meteorological and oceanographic data (e.g. netCDF)
  • other toolboxes:
    • scikit-learn - a machine learning toolbox with algorithms for classification, regression, clustering, etc.
    • Scrapy and BeautifulSoup - for (web) document parsing and crawling