A Productive Desktop Environment for Scientists and Engineers - Part II
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 lunch everyday! 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.
GMT - The Generic Mapping Tools
GMT is an open source collection of ~60 tools for manipulating geographic and Cartesian data sets (including filtering, trend fitting, gridding, projecting, etc.) and producing Encapsulated PostScript File (EPS) illustrations ranging from simple x-y plots via contour maps to artificially illuminated surfaces and 3-D perspective views. GMT supports ~30 map projections and transformations and comes with support data such as coastlines, rivers, and political boundaries. GMT is developed and maintained by Paul Wessel and Walter H. F. Smith with help from [gmt_team.html a global set of volunteers], and is supported by the National Science Foundation. It is released under the GNU General Public License.
