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Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Free GIS data sources for INDIA

1.
Natural Earth (www.naturalearthdata.com)
It is a public domain global map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. This portal is designed to meet the needs of the GIS users and cartographers. Map datasets consist of both vector data (attributes assigned) in the ESRI shapfile format and raster data comes in TIFF format with a TFW world file. All data use the WGS 1984 Geographic Coordinate System (GCS).
2.
International Steering Committee for Global Mapping ISCGM (www.iscgm.org)
The ISCGM is conducting the Global Mapping Project to develop and provide “Global Map” data set which is defined as “a group of geographical data sets of known and verified quality, with consistent specifications which will be open to the public”. But to download these data, free registration into this portal is mandatory.
Following types of data are available for various countries (enjoy our country INDIA is also listed there) and regions here:
Vector data in SHP, GML or VPF format: administrative boundary, transportation, drainage, population etc.
Raster data in BIL format: elevation, vegetation, land cover and land use data.
Data download link: https://www.iscgm.org/gmd/
3.
DIVA-GIS (www.diva-gis.org/)
DIVA-GIS is a free computer program for mapping and geographic data analysis. They also provide free spatial data for the whole world that you can use in DIVA-GIS or other GIS programs.
Category of Data:
Country Level
Global Level
Administrative areas, Inland water, roads, railroads, elevation, land cover, population, and gazetteer ( all are in vector format) data.
Global country boundaries, Global climate data, global 90 meter resolution elevation data and High resolution satellite images (LandSat) (apart from boundaries, all are in raster format).
Data download link: http://www.diva-gis.org/Data/
4.
GeoCommunity (www.geocommunity.com)
The GeoCommunity is the place for the GIS, CAD, Mapping, and Location-Based industry professionals, enthusiasts, and students to gather. It provides many useful GIS resources, one of them is the GIS Data Depot – is the place on the web to download free data for use with your GIS or CAD software.
The GIS data sources (both vector and raster) for our country INDIA in this site is http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/IN/datalist.html.  

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Training & Consultancy



CAD Centre, JadavpurUniversity offers a wide range of training courses in GIS, WebGIS, GPS Survey, and Remote Sensing; using both Proprietary and Open Source software. All such courses are well attended by both public and private sectors. The Centre is very well known in the GIS community and is very proactive in supporting and promoting proprietary and open source Geo-technologies.

Friday, February 14, 2014

Open Source Desktop GIS (Part 1)



gvsig logo


gvSIG Desktop is a powerful geographic information system (GIS) designed to offer a free and user-friendly solution to all needs related to geographic information management. It is characterized as a comprehensive, easy to use solution, it adapts to the needs of any GIS user. Access to the most common formats, both vector and raster, both local and remote is possible. It integrates with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards, and has a large number of tools to work with geographic information (visualization, mapping, geoprocessing, networks, etc.). All this features make gvSIG an ideal tool for users working with the territorial component.
In gvSIG, the first part of the abbreviation (i.e. gv) stands for Generalitat Valenciana, the Spanish regional authority that the system was originally developed for. The latter part, SIG, is the Spanish equivalent for the English GIS.

Some of its main features are: 
  • Portable: runs on different hardware / Operating System (OS) such as Linux, Windows (32/64 bits) and Mac OS. The programming language is Java.
  • Modular: is extensible with new functionality through the development of extensions/plug-ins, allowing a continuous improvement of the software as well as the development of custom solutions.
  • Open Source: under the GNU/GPL license, allowing free use, distribution, study and improvement.
  • Interoperable with solutions already implemented: it can access data from other proprietary programs, including ArcView, AutoCAD or Microstation without data conversion.
  • Multilingual: is available in more than twenty languages (Spanish, English, German, Italian ,...) and allows the addition of new languages easily.
  • Standards: Integrating in the same view both local (files, databases) and remote data through OGC standards such as Web Map Server (WMS), Web Feature Server (WFS) etc.

Main types of functionalities provided by gvSIG are:
  • Vector: Access to vector formats, databases, navigation, query, selection, analysis and geoprocessing, graphic editing and alphanumeric symbology, labeling, cartographic layout, data conversion to other formats and projection systems, relationships between tables, statistics, normalization, ...
  • Raster and remote sensing: access to raster formats, color tables and gradient, cropping of data and bands, and export layer, pixel processing, color processing, overviews generation, radiometric enhancements, histograms, raster reprojection, georeferencing, automatic vectorization, bands algebra, defining regions of interest, supervised and unsupervised classification, decision trees, fusion of images, mosaics, scatter diagrams, ...
  • Spatial Data Infrastructures and standards: access to remote services using OGC standards (WMS, WFS, WFS-T, WCS), access by non-standard services (ArcIMS, ECWP) catalog search service, gazetteer service, access standard file formats, OGC publishing extension, ...
  • 3D: 3D view flat, spherical 3D view, support all formats and remote services, elevation layers, vector layers with heights, 3D layers, direct visualization of vector layers or through the rasterization of vector layers, 3D symbols, extrusion vector layers, georeferencing and editing 3D objects, 3D frames, 3D Animation system, selection, information, stereo visualization (anaglyph, horizontal split, etc), full-screen display, geographical search by name (gazeeteer ),...

Download official final version of gvSIG 2.0 from here http://www.gvsig.org/web/projects/gvsig-desktop/official.