I work for a not-for-profit organization, we deal with trails, parks and open space.
We are beginning to deal extensively with property owners and need to print maps for presentations.
We are writing a grant proposal for approx $7.5K for GIS.
We are a Mac platform, so we need
Any ideas from GIS dopers?
Well, ESRI offers software + laptop combos that would drain your budget pretty quick (in the $10K+ range, with ArcGIS 8).
A better soultion in the PC realm would be a ArcView 3.3 licence (just under $2K), plus a Dell Latitude (another $2K), and an HP Designjet 500 series plotter (just over $2K).
Should you want to do it all on the cheap, you can get GRASS, a free & open-source GIS that can be run on OS X…
ArcView 3.3:
http://gisstore.esri.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?&DID=6&Product_ID=3188&CATID=112
Dell Latitude
http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/series_latit_notebooks.htm
HP Design Jet 500s
http://pandi.itrc.hp.com/busprod/summary/1,,25301,00.html?lsidebarLayId=106
GRASS
http://grass.ibiblio.org/index2.html
good luck!
Along with the free theme, The federal gov. has free public domain TIGER files for each county by FIPS code at the census.gov cite, the acuracy isn’t bad, the only difference is that they arn’t updated as often as the commercially available spatial data files. I’m also not sure how detailed the park and trail is in TIGERline. Your local county or city may have better public domain spatial data as well. I belive ESRI has ArcExplorer for free download as well, but I’ve never used it so I can’t vouch for it personally.
I got a little confused when I read your OP this afternoon. I thought you were asking about Mac-platform based GIS software. Can’t help you there - I’ve only run ESRI products off Unix and WinNT. I don’t think they make anything for Mac.
But then, I see you said you were looking at “one piece of PC-based hardware”, so maybe you’re looking at interfacing that with your existing Mac network.
I’d check with your partner orgs and see what they’re using - presumably you’ll be using some of their data, so you’d like your GIS to be compatable. I’ll bet they’re using ESRI, so I think you’ll want to as well. Sounds like a copy of ESRI ArcView would meet your present needs, and you can expand from there if you need to.
Thanks for your replies everyone.
I was just looking for some additional input, I beleive our partner organization uses ArcView. I was wondering what else was out there.
You might also look at Maptitude http://www.caliper.com/
Esri has about 65% of the market and is becoming the government standard. I have been working with County Government GIS for 10 years.
ArcView 3.2 should do what you need. But it will probably be going away pretty soon. It’s still very viable but you will start getting trouble with support. There are thousands and thousands of ArcView users, so it won’t curl up and die on you. ArcMAP is the new thing, very expensive though.
Re- tiger files - might be O.K. for some road centerline work, but, well they cover the whole country. The accuracy is less than ideal. They sure won’t have any trails. It’s a matter of scale.
GPS your trails. Don’t use Tiger. A couple of hundred dollar GPS unit will allow you to walk or bicycle your trails and will output them into ArcView shapefiles.
But, (isn’t there always one) you mentioned property owners. To address the property owners, you will need to relate (register) the trails to the property lines. You will need to register the GPS trails to either ground features or property lines. Lots of ways to try to do this. If you have to, print one map of the trails and another of the property lines. Put them on a light table and see what you get. You may be surprised, surveying is more of an art than an science.
Easiest (and cheapest) way to ‘ground truth’ would be to GPS the trails, print them out at the same scale of existing maps of the area. Compare these to Assessor maps (from the County) and recorded subdivision plats (from the Clerk and Recorder). Nothing is going to be in the same scale so it is going to be tough. But it may be enough to present some sort of case.
The Mac platform may be a problem, do you have access to a PC?
GIS is incredible, I’m watchin this thread, good luck.
Esri has about 65% of the market and is becoming the government standard. I have been working with County Government GIS for 10 years.
ArcView 3.2 should do what you need. But it will probably be going away pretty soon. It’s still very viable but you will start getting trouble with support. There are thousands and thousands of ArcView users, so it won’t curl up and die on you. ArcMAP is the new thing, very expensive though.
Re- tiger files - might be O.K. for some road centerline work, but, well they cover the whole country. The accuracy is less than ideal. They sure won’t have any trails. It’s a matter of scale.
GPS your trails. Don’t use Tiger. A couple of hundred dollar GPS unit will allow you to walk or bicycle your trails and will output them into ArcView shapefiles.
But, (isn’t there always one) you mentioned property owners. To address the property owners, you will need to relate (register) the trails to the property lines. You will need to register the GPS trails to either ground features or property lines. Lots of ways to try to do this. If you have to, print one map of the trails and another of the property lines. Put them on a light table and see what you get. You may be surprised, surveying is more of an art than an science.
Easiest (and cheapest) way to ‘ground truth’ would be to GPS the trails, print them out at the same scale of existing maps of the area. Compare these to Assessor maps (from the County) and recorded subdivision plats (from the Clerk and Recorder). Nothing is going to be in the same scale so it is going to be tough. But it may be enough to present some sort of case.
The Mac platform may be a problem, do you have access to a PC?
GIS is incredible, I’m watchin this thread, good luck.
I wouldn’t otherwise mention this, as Arcview is a superior product, if it weren’t for the fact you’re trying spread a small budget a long way.
You might want to look into a program I use to good effect, Golden Software’s Surfer. Between it, Excel and the shareware you can easily find linked at the USGS Eros data center site (for example sdts2dxf.exe), I am able to use all of the USGS spatial data I’ve needed, and it’s only ~$500.