Computing, GIS and Archaeology in the UK

A couple of people have remarked to me that one reason that they are not prepared to make the open source jump is the lack of support.

Well, last week I wrote about a mastermap importer that I had found. I said I would like to be able to merge the huge numbers of shapefiles produced into more manageable chunks. I got a lot of good advice as to ways I might be able to do that using gdal, which is really handy, BUT I also emailed the developer about the same problem. Two days later he released a new version of the software with that functionality built in.

To me, this highlights one of the big advantages of open source. People want to make their software better, and are willing to listen to suggestions. Small firms or one-man bands don’t have the inertia of the major firms and can respond to requests quickly and easily. To the user, that means flexibility and control. In other industries, that would be seen as an advantage, not a disadvantage, so why not in software?

Never apologise for delayed posts… this is a Sunday Tip Day post, not a Thursday! Anyhow…

I just found a super little cross-platform utility that takes shapefiles and dumps them to a variety of text-based formats. Download it here, and simply unzip it to use it.

There isn’t much documentation, but basically your options are to download to gpx or spreadsheet. The following gives you a simple delimited text file with the coordinates and values from your attribute table:

./shp2text -–spreadsheet /path/to/your/shapefile.shp > /path/to/output.txt

Bob is indeed your mother’s brother.

Just as we are settling down with the transition to open source, it would seem that a lot of other people are at least considering their options along the same lines, for whatever reason. This thread on the osgeo_discuss list, started off as a question about the value of open source to individual’s careers, but rapidly morphed into a discussion about replacing the ESRI packages. This seems to have lead to a general consensus about the areas where the open source packages do well and do badly.

The consensus seems to be that the open source packages are great for the behind-the-scenes and/or web-based work, assuming a relatively technically literate user, but that cartographic capabilities are sadly lacking at the moment. Furthermore, if you’re looking for one single replacement, then you’re out of luck- but you can assemble a toolkit that will get you all the capabilities you need, in a modular fashion. This does require a change in mindset- but it’s a lot more flexible and hopefully more powerful.

I hope that this recent upswell of interest and consensus about where the open source packages need improvement will help focus development in those areas. This does seem to be happening: this page is about plans for a cartographic library that can be shared amongst different packages. Sign up to show your support!

PS- if you’re in the UK you can still come along to our first UK OSGeo meetup at Stansted tomorrow (Thursday 1st) at 4.30. It’s free to attend, there will be some talks to start with (better finish writing mine), then we’ll sit down and try and figure out what we want a UK local chapter to do. There will be tea, coffee and biscuits too, so what are you waiting for!

Just what we needed- some good news- the AHRC are to continue funding the ADS. There isn’t any information publicly available yet as to how long the funding will last, and there is an intimation that charges for use will have to change, but all in all this is a good thing!