Geopackage: Difference between revisions
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If all you need is simple exchange and display then GeoPackage may be overkill and something like GeoJSON may be more appropriate. If you are looking for database capabilities like random access and querying then GeoPackage is a platform-independent, vendor-independent choice.||| Open Geospatial Consortium "[https://www.geopackage.org GeoPackage]"}}
== History ==
=== FHIS ===
{{Cquote|The year is 1978 and the place is the Champaign/Urbana, Illinois in the United States. Home of the University of Illinois (35,000 students) and the Army Corps of Engineer's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) (about 200 people).
Harvard University had graduated Jack Dangermond with a M.S. in landscape architecture in 1969 and he was now offering geospatial services to clients through his business called the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). Harvard had developed a series of GIS capabilities (including SYMAP and ODYSSEY), and the commercial ARCINFO built on the experiences with these systems.
We, at CERL, decided to purchase ARCINFO and entertained Jack Dangermond twice at our laboratory. ARCINFO was clearly the most capable and useful GIS software at the time and Mr. Dangermond was a person that we really wanted as a part of our GIS efforts. Unfortunately, we were not able to fund the $15,000 cost of the software and the $60,000 cost of the minicomputer required to run it.
We decided to develop some marketing tools by demonstrating GIS capabilities using an inexpensive Cromemco Z80 micro-computer. It had about 32KB of memory, ran at 8 Mhz, had 8-inch floppy disks, and a 377x241 pixel 16 color monitor. Between 1978 and 1980 I developed a small GIS package called LAGRID - the Landscape Architecture Gridcell analysis system, for a M.S. thesis project. I ported the FORTRAN-based LAGRID software to this machine and created some sales material, which generated a little bit of funding from the environmental office at Fort Hood, Texas. Unfortunately, this was not enough to enter into the hoped-for long-term relationship with ESRI.
So, we created the Fort Hood Information System (FHIS) using the wonderful programming skills of L. Van Warren. At this time, we tapped into available computers and software : the PDP-11 and the Unix operating system. Unix was developed at Bell Laboratories for their own use, but the government did not allow this telephone company to market their creation. Instead Unix was shared with all interested parties and a growing movement within computer science departments at universities was resulting in lots of software being contributed into the Unix freeware community.
FHIS was UNIX-based and made use of new 300-baud modems (300 bits per second, 40 bytes per second, 0.04Kbps) to connect the Fort Hood users on a vector-based CRT with the software running at the University of Illinois 900 km away. A dot-matrix printer was used to generate black and white maps. Printers at this time did not have associated drivers, but rather manuals describing the printer's language that software needed to generate.
FHIS was successful enough to attract interest from the Fort McClellan, Alabama environmental office, but still not enough funds were available for Jack's ESRI software.
The 300-baud modem experience proved unworkable and we determined that a computer must be placed at the user's site. It is now 1983 and the first small Unix computer was being offered by the just created Sun computer company. Michael O'Shea joined our little group as a programmer and we purchased a Sun-1 computer for our development purposes and one for Fort McClellan.
We delivered a system called IGIS - the Installation GIS. This system moved data from inside the programs (as in FHIS) to data bases, making it possible to use the same software for multiple locations. IGIS sported a Sun color monitor, which was separate from the monochrome monitor used to enter commands. Our Fort McClellan customer, Ray Clark, chief of the environmental office was impressed with the new computer and software for his office. Upon seeing the first map image on the screen, he asked "Can you rotate it?" The Star Trek TV series had really raised expectations within our target user community.|||James Westervelt (2004) "[https://grass.osgeo.org/files/westervelt2004_GRASS_roots.pdf GRASS Roots]" Proceedings of the FOSS/GRASS Users Conference Bangkok}}
=== GRASS ===
{{Cquote|GRASS GIS has been under continuous development since 1982, when the US Army Corps of Engineer's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (USA/CERL) started exploring the use of GIS for environmental research, monitoring and management of military lands. Since no other software package available back then met all their requirements, they designed and developed their own. GRASS GIS was born under the name of Fort Hood Information System (FHIS).
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