JIS Mapping Package

JIS is a simple software package I threw together since I couldn’t get any other open-source GIS packages to work on my (old) laptop running Linux. I think it is absolutely absurd that GIS software is so incredibly complicated, user-unfriendly, and hideously expensive ($30000 for the bottom-of-the-line ArcView!)

GIS is simply image manipulation with only-very-slightly-complicated image transformations required now and then. (Projection formulas are freely available on wolfram.com.) Information on many GIS file formats are also freely available, and quite easy to read and write. There is no excuse for the state of this industry except that GIS people want you to think that they deserve the big bucks they charge.

(Don’t hold back, what do you really think?)

To that end, I would be only too happy to collaborate with anyone interested in using my JIS package. It should run on any unix system, with only a few basic dependencies, such as libtiff. It has no user interface (otherwise it would have taken ten times as long to write). But it does have C, Perl, and Ruby APIs. It is fully documented, if not necessarily fully tested.

It performs all the basic mapping tasks we’ve needed to produce our elevation,climate, LDU, hotspot, and range maps. Namely, it can process digital elevation models and simple shape files. It can reproject maps, and stores the projection information with the output files. It can do interpolation surfaces between regular and randomly scattered datapoints. It can draw most graphics primitives, including legends, polygons, etc.

There is plenty of room for expansion: adding projections and support for E00 files being two of the highest priority projects.

Please contact me if you have any interest in the project. You can see the source code here.

—Jason, July 12, 2008