| [udig-dev] Followup: FOSS4G UK 2013 User Discussion |
Hi Folks,
Just wanted to followup on the FOSS4G 2013 UK discussion of our uDig dinner discussion. Was quite lively & really enjoyed it.
For those not there, it was a discussion from the users perspective of several items that I thought were needed. My intention is not to directly compare to any particular open source desktop but to advocate what I see as enhancements that would help a user embrace and contribute to. In no particular order the items are as follows:
1 - user documentation/help
2 - scripting capabilities
3 - additional geoprocessing tools
4 - user defined tool boxes
5 - providing common gui for user defined tools/plugins
1 - user documentation/help
The current help is great but it would be nice to have a users quick start guide. something along the lines that walks a new user through a variety of spatial tasks to be completed in both raster/vector & ogc web services. Generically this would include how to load data, manipulate & display through a series of graphical pages. I would envision the document being community editable.
2 - scripting capability
I had mentioned Python as something that most GIS users are familiar with, given for example that ESRI has now embraced it. I'm told technically that this is not feasible (please correct if I've misinterpreted this). Scala was mentioned as it could be implemented. Could Jython be implemented? Is geoscript implemented or could be implemented? I certainly have a preference for python as it supports a large module library that allows a lot of heavy lifting with little user effort. Regardless, scripting is needed and provided that the documentation came with numerous examples and allowed access to the spatial toolbox.
3 - additional geoprocessing tools/plugins
To set the terms of reference here, by tool I mean a user defined script that they created or imported to allow a spatial function(s) to operate against data. It can be executed either by double clicking and providing a gui or called via the built in scripting language. I have not reviewed all the options available in the spatial toolbox, so please correct my omissions. I envision that given sufficient building blocks of core tools like a strong raster calculator, attribute manipulation (field renaming,geometry accessors, mathematical operators etc) & vector access (segment geometry such as getting first/last/centroids nodes, length, azimuth etc) that a user will build complex tools that could be added back into the spatial toolbox. Getting the community to create new tools & share them (uDig user contributed tools/plugins) would accelerate the spatial capability. QGIS does this really well that users add immense capabilities by contributing tools through plugins.
4 - user defined tool boxes
This expands the point above. As a user I could create a categorical hierarchy of scripts i.e. watershed analysis where I would have a series of scripts that deal with this particular issue.
5 - providing a common gui for user defined tools/plugins
When the user defines a new tool for the spatial toolbox they are presented with options to define the gui when tool is double clicked. They only specify the input, output, options & help that are required to execute the script. The actual gui interface (size,colour, font etc) is handled by uDig. Perhaps extending this to plugins could be looked at?
Please jump in and add/correct anything here. These are just a few of the discussions points that I recall from our chat. I think given some additional analytical functions that uDig could really become a great option for many users. I'm unsure how the licensing of uDig would impact say a user wanting to interface a connection with a GPL3 product like SAGA GIS or R for stats? Could someone comment, because this is becoming something that I see on a daily bases.
Look forward to your thoughts/ideas!