GIS

GIS on Linux with SAGA

In this article, I want to look at a GIS option available for Linux—specifically, a program called SAGA (System for Automated Geoscientific Analyses). SAGA was developed at the Department of Physical Geography in Germany. It is built with a plugin module architecture, where various functions are provided by individual modules. A very complete API is available to allow users to extend SAGA's functionality with newly written modules. I take a very cursory look at SAGA here and describe a few things you might want to do with it.

Gabor Farkas' Practical GIS (Packt Publishing)

Open-source GIS tools are maturing rapidly, and Gábor Farkas' new book Practical GIS is a guide to applying these tools to managing geographic information like a pro at minimal cost. Farkas deploys the popular QGIS application and explains how to use it to generate useful spatial data.

Mapping Your GIS Data

I've already looked at some GIS applications available on Linux. Programs like GRASS and qgis provide a full set of tools to do GIS. Sometimes, that's really overkill though. You may just want to display some data geographically and create a map. For those cases, there is Thuban, an interactive geographic data viewer.