some GIS links and comments

[Catherine Dibble]

hi Alex and GIS Swarm folks,

You can find a handy list of GIS software packages at:
http://triton.cms.udel.edu/~vinton/gis_gip/gis_gip_list.html

I'd suggest looking most closely at:

Arc/Info, from ESRI
http://www.esri.com
the industry leader, for better or worse with respect to
cost and ease of Swarm interoperability.  (AMLs and/or
AVENUE only if you want Arc/Info to take control...)
Wrt lock-in, this is where you'll find the most users, and
scattered across the broadest range of applications, from
ecosystem modeling to planning to facilities management.

Idrisi, from Clark University
http://www.idrisi.clarku.edu/
which is small (I once installed it on a 386 laptop w 120Mb HD.),
inexpensive (<$200 for educational users), and widely used in
developing regions of the world.  Idrisi is only raster based, but
this could be an advantage for first-cut portability and inexpensive
GIS access for Swarm modelers.  (Which may be an advantage
for some types of data, but perhaps not necessarily with respect
to GIS functionality as a complement to Swarm.)

Another possibility is Smallworld, which is elegant and object-oriented 
(in a computer science sense) and thus has my nomination as a 
promising candidate for an especially graceful tightly-coupled
integration with Swarm:  
http://www.smallworld-us.com/
Though I believe Smallworld caters primarily to facilities management
(perhaps of use to urban planners?) rather than ecosystem modeling.
I would dearly love to be corrected on this point!  :)

GRASS, like Idrisi, is limited to raster-only, is no longer free,
and was never particularly user- or developer- friendly.  So I
have trouble seeing advantages in pursuing this.  But that's
only my two cents re GRASS, and perhaps someone closer
to GRASS may care to comment?

For curious Swarm modelers who are new to GIS, the
NCGIA (National Center for Geographic Information and
Analysis) has a hot-off-the-press still-being-drafted new
version of the GIS Core Curriculum available online at:
http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/education/curricula/giscc/cc_outline.html

Note especially Mike Goodchild's "What is GIScience?" intro at:
http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/education/curricula/giscc/units/u002/

>  Here's some ideas totally off the top of my head - in increasing
>  order of unlikelihood and vaporousness :-)
>
>  * totally-decoupled: 
>  * loosely-coupled:
>  * highly-coupled:

There is an enormous literature on integration and interoperability
between GIS and complementary analytical and modeling software.
See, for example, papers in GIS/LIS Conference Proceedings or
_GIS World_, and NCGIA Technical Papers (online list available at:
http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/publications.html), especially Initiative 6.

Two things to note:

(a) It isn't necessarily a choice between decoupled, loosely-coupled,
OR highly-coupled, so much as a question of obvious stages, and then
how far it's worth to push the coupling process (I heartily second 80/20 here).

For example, the obvious first step would be to write Swarm landscape
objects that can read and write to/from some widely-available GIS formats. 

(b) Note here that it is file formats that are relevant, which may or may not 
map 1:1
to GIS platforms.  For example, Arc/Info reads a wide variety of file formats
from raster (x, y, and a z data value for each cell) to vector, to network.

Imho, Arc/Info and/or Idrisi raster layer formats would be an obvious place to
start.

Once we can read and also write GIS layers to and from Swarm, then individual
modelers can begin to push the interoperability envelope with respect to degrees
of model integration, frequency of update, calling GIS operations from Swarm
or calling Swarm batch models from AML/AVENUE style GIS macros.

Although my models are fairly formal and abstract for the time being (sanity!),
my research focus is on modeling human-environmental interactions via 
Swarm.  So I have a long-term interest in allowing my agents to *change* their
landscapes in ways that can someday coordinate with actual GIS layers.  

8)
Catherine 
Dibble*-----------------------------------------------------------------------*
| Catherine Dibble         |                                            |
| Department of Geography  |   "Theory provides the maps that turn an   |
| University of California |    uncoordinated set of experiments or     |
| Santa Barbara, CA 93106  |    computer simulations into a cumulative  |
|                          |    exploration."                           |
|                          |                                            |
| address@hidden       |    -- Booker, Goldberg, Holland (1989)     |
| www.geog.ucsb.edu/~cath  |      _Artificial Intelligence_ 40:235-282  |
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------*


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