[UFO Chicago] Using mapping software for graphical uses?

[Brian Sobolak]

Nate Riffe wrote:
> Brian Sobolak said this (probably recently):
>>
>> Has anyone come across or used a software product they could recommend
>> for
>> integrating data with maps?  What I'd like to display are things like
>> "Sales By Region" or a heat map of customers by region, etc.?
>>
>> It doesn't have to be free (beer || source), but it does have to be able
>> to do something like the following:
>>
>>   -- display a different color for each state based on, say, sales info
>>   -- ability to plot points when fed coordinates or addresses
>>   -- work internationally and domestically
>>   -- work on a client machine as opposed to a website.
>>
>> I've seen that Google Earth will do some of what I'm looking for if I
>> buy
>> the professional version for $400.  Microsoft MapPoint might too for
>> $300.
>>  But are there any alternatives?
>
> [inkblot at dorothy:~]$ apt-cache search grass
> gpx2shp - convert GPS or GPX file to ESRI Shape file
> grass - Geographic Resources Analysis Support System
> grass-doc - Geographic Resources Analysis Support System documentation
> libgrass - GRASS GIS development libraries
> libgrass-dev - GRASS GIS library development files
>

Grass is great (haha) if you're an academic and want to do all sorts of
great things with it; if you're lazy like I am and just want to upload a
spreadsheet of long/lat locations and have them appear on a map it's
overkill.

I did some more searching, and there are sites like opengis.org that are
directories.  It seems that there are a few interesting solutions,
including Mapserver from UMN (who brought us the awesome gopher://), that
I might investigate.

>From talking to Neil last night at the meeting, it looks like Tiger/GIS
offers a service that will probably do what I need; I'll give it a shot
and report back to the list.  (I might also try M$ local.live.com service
on Linux to test their service on non-Windows OSs.)

Thanks,

brian

--
Brian Sobolak
http://www.planetshwoop.com/