Comment by boxerab
1 day ago
QGIS is fantastic - it's the only OSS viewer I know of that can consistently and efficiently display multi-GB TIFF images without crashing. It has been a long journey - 20 years to capture ~8% of the geospatial market. ESRI still rules the enterprise, with 40-50% of the market share. More generally, there are so many excellent open source geospatial projects like Geoserver, GDAL, Geonode, Map GL Libre, kepler.gl, Martin, Mapserver, .... but they still have not managed to disrupt ESRI. I think because they are still too fragmented, and still mostly stuck on the desktop, while everything is moving to the cloud.
We are running mapserver in production in the cloud (AWS lambda) to visualize lots of different data using WMS. We're also doing lots of processing using GDAL in the cloud as well. Compared to ESRI it's amazingly cost effective even considering Amazon's high prices.
nice. If you aren't already familiar, you might be interested in this platform for Dutch geospatial data: https://github.com/PDOK . They use mapserver on the cloud at massive scale, and all of their infra is open.
Thanks, I wasn't aware. I'll definitely take a look.
I do all my GIS work in R, and prefer it to a GUI first approach to be honest.
What R modules do you use for that?
There are quite a few. https://guides.library.columbia.edu/geotools/R I mostly used sf at uni and also preferd it to QGIS in most scenarios. Far from a pro user though.