Chapter 3. The Geospatial Technology Landscape
The geospatial technology ecosystem consists of hundreds of software libraries and packages. This vast array of choices is overwhelming for newcomers to geospatial analysis. The secret to learning geospatial analysis quickly is to understand the handful of libraries and packages that really matter. Most software, both commercial and open source, is derived from these critical packages. Understanding the ecosystem of geospatial software and how it's used allows you to quickly comprehend and evaluate any geospatial tool.
The major categories for geospatial software are:
- Data access
- Computational geometry (including data reprojection)
- Visualization
- Metadata tools
These categories contain core capabilities, which are widely used by most geospatial software. Another important category is image processing; however, this category is very fragmented, containing dozens of software packages which are rarely integrated into derivative software...
