[FRIAM] Distributed Urban Information Systems

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Raymond Parks wrote:
> PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
>   
>> Idrisi, a sophisticated and professional GIS program, is available from
>> Clark University, Nick's academic home, for much less than ARC View. 
>> Idrisi is much easier to use than ArcView.
>>     
>
>   However, I am not willing to make a minimum $1250 investment without
> some chance at a preview or test of the product.  BTW, finding that cost
> turned out to be much more difficult than it should be on that web-site.
>  The web-site seems to further the stereotype of academics not having a
> clue about business.
>   
Btw, ArcView's capabilities are exposed as COM interfaces (called 
`ArcObjects') and programming ArcView in Visual Basic is not hard.   
There are accessible books on the topic. 

A related technology that may be of interest is the open source PostGis 
project.  This adds geographical proximity extensions to SQL (Postgres). 

Marcus