List of GeoSpatial tools

[MBoustani]

@wenzeslaus lets talk about the tools are missing to have in GISCube and it is very important for a GIS Analysis to have here.

[wenzeslaus]

As I said (#56) it depends on the target audience. If you aim at municipalities, then, for the start, you need a lot of things related to management of vectors and attribute tables (e.g., joins and forms to fill in the data correctly). Imports and exports to CAD formats would be important too.

A lot of GIS users are limited to (2D) vectors as (the only) data type and weighted overlay and buffer as analyses. So, this might be quite important too.

Scientists on the other hand, work very often with raster data. Raster algebra and neighborhood analyses are often used tools but you usually combine these with tools specific to your field. Interpolating raster from points is often necessary.

Then there are specific areas such as image processing (not only things like rectification but more importantly the part of getting or enhancing information in the imagery), network analysis, raster cost surfaces, hydrology-related tools (watershed delineation, water flow accumulation, erosion potential and many more), and (spatio-)temporal data analysis.

Then there are tools which are not analytical but important for general GIS work, this would be a query tool in the first place. For some people, (advanced ISO compliant) metadata are very important. Completely separate big topic is visualization and cartography (colors, legends, scales, ...) combined with creation of web maps and providing map layers as web services (WMTS, WMS, WFS, ...).

As for the analysis part, you can hardly replicate all the functionality of other GIS but you can certainly use it. On possible way how to do it is to use WPS which will ensure that GISCube will remain quite independent on the particular tools used for processing. Look at PyWPS (http://pywps.wald.intevation.org/) and ZOO project (www.zoo-project.org). Using WPS you get a clear way how to enhance GISCube. The backend could be, for example GRASS GIS or QGIS (QGIS Processing). They can be also used directly (without WPS) which allows to have data and processing on the same machine (well you can achieve the same with WPS too when used in certain way). But the discussion on what and how to connect is again a separate topic (see also the older email I sent you).

[MBoustani]

Thanks @wenzeslaus
Justs added buffer shapefile tool.