The server applications logically run on Linux, as well as Windows and Unix.
On the backend are the ArcGIS servers, namely the ArcGIS Server, ArcGIS Image Server and ArcIMS. The ArcGIS Desktop unfortunately only runs on Windows. For instance, you might pull together a map and hospital information and then analyze how far the city's population lives from the hospitals, as is illustrated in this graphic. The ArcGIS desktop is the main user tool, complete with a powerful GUI, for combining, analyzing and presenting your geographic elements. ArcGIS is dubbed by ESRI as "The Complete Enterprise GIS" and is a suite of applications with desktop, server, online and mobile elements. As mentioned above, the Big Kahuna of GIS is ESRI, whose flagship product is called "ArcGIS".
In this article, I will briefly introduce the most interesting GIS-based tools that run on Linux, including a brief first look at an interesting tool for investigating GIS, ESRI's ArcReader. That fact, along with my being curious and a Linux and open-source advocate, spurred me investigate the state of GIS tools for Linux. Luckily my university, Michigan State, can afford ArcGIS's $1500 per seat pricetag, but unfortunately I cannot. I have used ArcGIS mainly in the context of my graduate studies in natural-resource management. I am a desktop GIS user, and nearly all of my experience has been on a proprietary program called ArcGIS from ESRI. We will get more into those terms as we explore specific applications.įor a good overview of GIS, this link from ESRI, the largest and most well-known company devoted to GIS, is a good place to start: Just so you don't get confused, you will also encounter other GIS terms like coverage, shapefile, geodatabase, vector and raster, which are simply data formats within a GIS application. A GIS is your tool for combining all of this geographic data together, querying that data, finding relationships, and presenting it as you wish, such as in a custom map. buildings, dams, bridges), altitudes, seismic data, demographics, satellite imagery, aerial photos, CAD files, land cover, and so much more. rivers, lakes), human-made features (e.g. townships, states, watersheds, zoning categories), natural features (e.g. Just some examples are: maps, jurisdictions (e.g. Only with GIS, you control every element and can work with any kind of data you can imagine that relates to place. For those uninitiated to GIS - not a surprise since proprietary GIS is not cheap - if you have tinkered with GoogleEarth, you've gotten a good taste what it's like. With a background like that, you can imagine the joy I experienced discovering perhaps the most sophisticated cartographic tools available, i.e. To this day, my wife knows that the gift of an atlas or other cartographic doodad will set my face aglow. During our trips I would study each page, curious about the unique aspects of each place and landscape, wondering secretly "what's at the end of that unpaved road that leads off the page?" Such was the beginning of my cartographic addiction, and I am still hooked.
Each sheet has a roadmap on top, which folds out to reveal a wealth of local information, such as the highest mountain peaks in the area, the populations and descriptions of the cities and towns and the sights worth a detour. A TripTik is a spiral-bound booklet of maps that lead you one-by-one to your destination. As a kid, before my family hit the road for our summer vacations, my father would always visit AAA and get a "TripTik" for the route. Future articles will explore this and other individual tools in greater depth. This article provides an overview of Linux-based tools for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including a quick take on the ESRI's ArcReader.