Development of Assessment Criteria for Various Open Sources GIS Software Packages

Abstract

There has been a significant development in the area of free and open source geospatial software. Research has flourished over the decades from vendor-dependent software to open source software where researchers are paying increasing attention to maximize the value of their data. It is often a difficult task to choose particular open source GIS (OGIS) software among a number of emerging OGIS software. It is important to characterise the projects according to some unified criteria. Each software has certain advantages and disadvantages and it is always time consuming to identify exactly which software to select for a specific purpose. This chapter focuses on the assessment criteria enabling developers, researchers, and GIS users to select suitable OGIS software to meet their requirements for analysis and design of geospatial application in multidisciplinary fields. This chapter highlights the importance of assessment criteria, followed by an explanation of each criteria and their significance with examples from existing OGIS software.