GIS

[samlord]

Part of my course next year involves using GIS~ ( geographic Information System (GIS) is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the earth. In the strictest sense, it is a computer system capable of integrating, storing, editing, analyzing, sharing, and displaying geographically-referenced information. In a more generic sense, GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries (user created searches), analyze the spatial information, edit data, maps, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying the geographic concepts, applications and systems, taught in degree and GIS Certificate programs at many universities.)

programs and was just wondering if any body has any experience using them and wanted to know if they are complicated to use or if i will need to upgrade this PC a dell dimension ( i was planning to build a new PC but i spent all my money ) to use the programs

 

[blueboy2001]

I use GIS extensively, the main players for desktop software are ESRI ArcGIS and MapInfo, but there are a few others. I mostly use ESRI stuff, but I've tinckered with MapInfo a bit in the past.

The software licences for the most basic version of ArcMap are about £1000 a pop, so unless you're getting a student copy I doubt you'll be installing it on your own PC.

The main issue is not so much the GIS software but the data. It really depends on what sort of data you'll be using, but the most detailed OS mapping is MasterMap and that really needs to be run from a ArcSDE (or ArcGIS as is now) server for best results. You can convert it to a shapefile but its slow unless you have a lot of RAM.

If you are going to be doing detailed analysis then a fast CPU will help, but I do a lot of GIS work on my Dell laptop with a 2GHz Core2Duo and 1Gb RAM and it's fine.

They are very powerful programs that do a lot and take a bit of time to get used to. To load some data up and print a map is fairly easy, doing detailed data manipulation and analysis with ESRI's 3D Analyst extension gets rather more complex.