zigGIS

Return on Non-Investment

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Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on Clubhouse, hosted by Todd Barr and Jordan Cullen, and including Will Cadell of SparkGeo. Clubhouse seems to be a really convenient venue for setting up such a forum with low barriers to entry, so that was enjoyable. The topic of the discussion was “Geospatial ROI” and we talked about various ways to articulate the value of geospatial (the data and the concept) and GIS (the toolset to exploit geospatial).

One topic that we didn’t have time to get to, but has been at the front of my mind for a while is the “return on non-investment” with regard to open-source tools, geospatial or otherwise. Open-source has been mainstream for quite some time and platforms like Github make it easier to publish, manage, and maintain open-source tools. As a result, it’s easier than it’s ever been to find and use open-source tools to solve your problem.

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A Brief Retrospective

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This is the time of year where retrospectives of the previous twelve months become all the rage as content providers have column inches and/or pixels to fill up while skipping out the door on holiday breaks. As an independent blogger, I have no such requirements and the topic of this post, while retrospective, has nothing to do with 2014.

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Checking Out the GDAL/OGR Plugin for ArcGIS

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A while back, I blogged the availability of a GDAL/OGR plug-in for ArcGIS desktop by Ragi Burhum at AmigoCloud. At the time, I was hoping to dig into it fairly quickly but that didn’t happen and I’m finally getting to it. Anyone who has followed this blog for a while knows that I have had more than a passing interest in integrating new data sources with ArcGIS over the years. This comes from the fact that, as a technology geek, I am fascinated by all forms of technology and enjoy the process of integration and, as a consultant providing services to the Federal Government, most of my customers have standardized on Esri tools. Integrations such as GeoRSS, PostGIS, GeoCommons and GeoJSON have directly benefitted my customers for real-world applications so I continue look for ways to remove the barriers between them and the data they seek.

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Still Jonesing for zigGIS? Try this OGR Plug-In for ArcGIS.

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So I’ve actually noticed a surprising uptick in traffic related to zigGIS lately? We also had someone asking about ST-Links on the zigGIS mailing list last week. Clearly, there’s still a level of interest out there for the problem that zigGIS was designed for. ArcGIS reading SpatiaLite natively, thanks to OGR and Ragi Burhum Along … Read more