GEOG 5670 - Open Source Geospatial Tools

Graduate students should enroll in GEOG 6670 and will be held to a higher standard and/or more work. Free, open source software (FOSS) provides an alternative to commercially available tools. Years and decades of community development now means that many of the FOSS alternatives now rival their commercial counterparts for features, are often more robust. The past few years have seen an expansion of open source software for dealing with geographical data. In this course, we will focus on QGIS and GRASS GIS, explore other existing open source tools for geographical data management and analysis, and discover some of the pros and cons of open source software. Each students will be required to provide an overview of one other example of open source geographical software to the class, as well as build a GIS project and perform some spatial analysis.