What do you expect to get out of the Session?

[Steven Gray]

Give us an idea of what skills you want to come away with at the end of our session.

[Sam Martin]

I would like to know more about plotting social media data on a map.  How to source lat & long coordinates when data mining, and what are the best GIS tools to use.

[lindasee4]

Hi Sam,

 

if you are attending the Visualising the City workshop in the afternoon, then we will be plotting some twitter data as part of learning QGIS. It will be mega-basic in terms of the GIS but you'll see how to make simple maps. If you aren't attending it, then you can have the notes from the workshop. I will be making them available online afterwards.

 

As for the best GIS to use, that's a hard question to answer. I use ArcGIS a lot so that's my preferred system and my institute has unlimited licenses so cost is not an issue. That said, we are doing a lot more in R these days since it's just much faster. QGIS is also good but a bit temperamental at times.

 

Linda

 

[Richard Milton]

You can find a list of OpenSource GIS projects at the following link:

 

http://opensourcegis.org/

 

It's a bit overwhelming with 350 projects listed, so it's really a case of finding a tool that does what you want. QGIS is generally the first choice free GIS, but a lot of people also use MapWindow. FWTools and GRASS are both technically good, but quite hard to use. In terms of the software development work that I do, Geotools is the best Java library for programmers, while for C# I use SharpMap and the NetTopologySuite port of the Java JTS.

[Sam Martin]

Hi Linda,

Thank-you for the info - very helpful indeed.  I will be attending the Visualising the City workshop, so I look forward to engaging with twitter while learning QGIS.  I have checked with my institution, and they also have licenses for ArcGIS, so I also look forward to getting to grips with it.  Are there any good R books or courses that you recommend?

Thanks,

Sam

On Wednesday, 4 September 2013 17:36:10 UTC+1, lindasee4 wrote:

[Sam Martin]

Thank-you Richard - the opensourcegis site looks like a great resource.  I'll also look into MapWindow and the other good tools too.  Very good to know about the best Java library too - I have also dabbled in the lighter D3.js library, but am also interested in looking into what C# an do too.

Thanks,

Sam

[lindasee4]

Hi Sam,

 

As part of the Talisman project, there will be R training coming up soon (one date in Dec and one in Jan) as well as ArcGIS training. You can find information about the Talisman project here: http://www.geotalisman.org. However, those courses will probably not be listed yet so I would either email the Talisman training co-ordinator at the University of Leeds (a.on...@leeds.ac.uk) for the details or check out the website nearer to Dec.

 

I don't know of any good books about R (although I'm sure there are many) but there is a lot of free material online, e.g.

 

http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/files/scicomp/Dloads/RProgramming/BestFirstRTutorial.pdf

 

or

 

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html

 

Linda

 

 

 

 

[Sam Martin]

Very, very helpful - thank-you Linda.  I will most certainly look into getting onto the Talisman project course, and thank-you for the R links - appreciated.  

Looking forward to the conference.

Best,

Sam