Thursday
Mar232006
MapWindow GIS
Thursday, March 23, 2006 at 1:50AM Does anyone have any experience with MapWindow GIS? It seems like another open source GIS solution, with potentially more of a focus on functionality thatn just viewing data, but it's Windows only. I might give it a whirl tomorrow. This screenshot is pretty.
Reader Comments (4)
I'm not sure this counts as an , but I went to a demo presentation at a GIS meeting at Idaho State University last spring - it was given by Daniel Ames who's listed as the "Team Leader" on the MapWindow GIS website. He highlighted some nice capabilities with USGS water data and a plug-in stream analysis toolkit. It looked very good to me as a Windows-based alternative to ArcIMS, which was the main software I'd been teaching to students in my fall semester class up at UM. (Note that at that time I hadn't even looked at MapServer or any other open source options). MapWindow GIS definitely seemed to be more than just a GIS viewer.
I was so enthusiastic that I downloaded the executables, and then promptly moved on to other things and never even installed it and haven't touched it since.... How's that for an enthusiastic recommendation? :-). Seriously, I'm looking forward to taking another look at it.
I have been very impressed with MapWindow GIS. It’s pretty quick and relatively stable (some builds are better than others), and is great for building customize plug-ins. If you’re into .NET and GIS, it’s great to download the source code and step through the application to see how the guts of a GIS work.
I have been using it as an interface for manipulating and viewing GIS data (shapefiles) in Google Earth through a plug-in called Shape2Earth. Lots of fun!