What Gis System to use?

I am working on a project at work where we need a GIS system. However
I am getting a bit lost with all the different systems out there.

The requirements we need are pretty basic.

We have a website we want populated with Geo Content. We have
locations in europe which we want to link to POI's nearby.

So for instance there are 10 hotels in paris which are 10k's from the
eiffel tower.

we would need a system where we can input certain POI's in france and
also input certain hotel locations and then say for instance we want a
circle of 10k around the eiffel towers and all hotels in that radius
should be marked with a label eiffel tower.

also we want to do this with certain areas. ie we want to mark
beaches, create our own vectors of that beach and then mark certain
hotels as in walking distance of that beach.

This is the basic back end functionality we need. Also in the future
we would like this to be graphically represented in a map (ie. google
maps or similar).

What GIS system do you guys recommend that can do this?

Many Thanks,

Erik Withoud

This is a classic 'we need a GIS; what should we get?' question.
Without some idea of the scale of your project, the equipment
you have, it's like asking 'what sort of computer do I need?'.

The market leader is ESRI's ArcGIS, which provides a complete GIS
solution, including a web-enabled server interface [ArcServer] and
associate geodatabase. It'll serve your data real-time to anyone
logged into your website, and provide just about every GIS
functionality in the known universe. It's what the professionals
use. Last time I looked, it cost about $30K per seat.

Another commercial GIS is Manifold, which also comes with a web
server option. It's cheaper than ArcGIS [about 1000% cheaper], and
can do a lot of the same things. Costs between $500-800, depending
on features included.

Quantum GIS is a hobbyist GIS with minimal features. It is not
web-enabled, but you could use it for data manipulation fairly
easily. Oh, and it's free. So also are ILWIS, Spring, CHiPS, and GRASS,
but I doubt you want to go there.

If you know the names of a few GIS packages, I don't doubt people
here can offer comments. I think I've probably used every commercial
and non-commercial GIS and remote sensing package in existence.
Just to be extra-helpful, here's a list:


CHIPS
ENVI
ERMapper 6.4
GIS Explorer
Leica Photogrammetry Suite
MapInfo7.5
Mappoint
OSSIM
OpenEV
OzGIS
Quantum GIS
SAGA
TatukGIS
eCognition
Geomatica
Grass
Idrisi
Ilwis
Manifold
Multispec
Opticks
Spring
Tanasoft
Tatukgis
Udig GIS
Wheat

Atom Egoyan
Melbourne, Australia

Atom Egoyan wrote:

Actually, it's called ArcGIS Server... ARCServer being a tape backup
software.



ArcGIS Server costs a multiple of that, last time I looked.

Anyway, If Erik wants to serve maps on the web, a good open source (and
OGC standards-compliant) solution is GeoServer... MapServer would do too.



I beg to differ: with the GRASS plugin you can do almost anything GRASS
can do from within the confortable QuantumGIS user interface... and
GRASS can do a hell of a lot.

Regards,

--------------------
Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
--------------------

[...]


Assuming he has some other means of preparing the map data.



OK. I think we could agree GRASS can do a lot. But, could we also
agree that the process of getting Erik's data into a form suitable
for use in GRASS and then serving it over the web is way overkill
for what we know of his project? He wants [I infer] a relatively
straightforward path to his final destination.

The elephant in the room for most GIS applications is the data
manipulation or transformations required to get the information
into a form where it can be used. Most business analysis of GIS
projects put this at 60-80% of the cost. As soon as you tranform
your data from one format to another [whether file format,
geographic co-ordinate system or geodatabase], things start to
become just that little bit complicated. GRASS has its own, very
special, file format, quite unlike any other. Quantum GIS will
let you use the standard formats [shapefile, MIF, etc], right up
until you want to use the GRASS plugins. Then you have to take
time out to transform it into a different format. I think the
database interface in Quantum is counterintuitive, as well, but
that really is just my opinion.

Atom Egoyan

Atom Egoyan pisze:



Talking about MapServer - QGIS has a plugin for exporting the QGIS
project to a MapServer mapfile.



Besides GRASS integration, there is also fTools plugin [1] (contained in
tools for sampling, analysis and geometry operations on any
OGR-supported vector format (i.e. Shapefile and more [2]). Written in
Python, thus easily extendible if needed.


What do you mean by "database interface"?

Maciek

[1]http://www.ftools.ca/fTools.html
[2]http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_formats.html

--
Maciej Sieczka
www.sieczka.org