GIS Desktop Comparison

This page is used to coordinate comparisons between GeoSpatial Desktop applications to help users select suitable applications for their requirements.

Background

The OSGeo community helped select FOSS4G 2009 conference presentations ranked the OSGeo comparison projects very highly. Unfortunately, there were only a few of these types of presentations. Of the 183 quality presentations submitted, there was 85 speaking slots, and 3 of the highest ranked presentations targeted the comparison of popular packages.

The presentations were:

• Ranked 2: The WMS Performance Shootout
• Ranked 8: PostGIS and Oracle Spatial
• Ranked 9: There is no alternative to Openlayers...? (discussing OpenLayers vs other AJAX clients)

The moral to the story is that conference delegates and the greater community want to see how different projects compare, and to date we have had a shortage of such material(partly because it is a lot of work to set up).

This page hopes to facilitate the development of a desktop GeoSpatial comparison.

What projects can participate

While this comparison has initially focused on Open Source applications, we wish to also cover proprietary applications as well.

Project Descriptions

The OSGeo LiveDVD maintains a list of paragraph long [Project Definitions], and page long Project Descriptions.

Details available here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Build#Writing_docs

Target Presentations

It is intended that the results of these desktop comparisons will be presented:

• On the OSGeo Live DVD
• At the FOSS4G 2010 conference

References

• Open Source GIS comparison tables: http://www.spatialserver.net/osgis/
• http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Code_Sprint#The_desktop_comparison_tasks_list
• Matrix on OSGeo and COTS software functionality