A Productive Desktop Environment for Scientists and Engineers - Part II
From assela Pathirana
GIS ? ... Not quite.
Recently many have fallen into the the habit of throwing around the term Geographical Information System (or much cooler GIS) as if it is something we eat for our everyday lunch! While these are extremely useful tools for many advanced applications in different fields, often one does not need a full-fledged GIS system to achieve many targets related to processing of spatial data.
Personally I found that more than 50% of the tasks I had to do with spatial datasets could be realized using tools far less complicated than a complete GIS system. There are a number of software products that can be used to draw beautiful maps and also to perform some basic spatial data analysis tasks. We shall learn to use one of them in this chapter.
- Note
- It is important that we have a basic knowledge on the tools like cygwin, Unix commands, shell scripting, awk, sed, etc. Therefore it is necessary to complete the previous section, before attempting this one.
