[R-sig-Geo] ArcGIS Geostatistical Analyst -- how does it display / fit variograms?

[Barry Rowlingson]

2008/9/6 D G Rossiter <rossiter at itc.nl>:

> Naturally we want the students to understand what the program is doing
> for them!  Although ESRI promotes "press the button and look at the
> cross-validation". I do like their disclaimer in the ArcGIS Desktop
> 9.3 help: "Kriging is a complex procedure that requires greater
> knowledge about spatial statistics than can be conveyed in this
> command reference". They then ref. Burrough (1986! not even the
> revised book), Heine (1986), McBratney & Webster Journal of Soil Sci.
> 37:317 (1986), Oliver IJGIS 4 (1990), Press etc. Numerical Recipes,
> and Royle et al. Geoprocessing 1 (1981). Not exactly the most up to
> date or accessible reference list (no offrence to the fine authors
> mentioned).

 For software that costs $2500 dollars for a single-user license, I'd
expect documentation written in gold-leaf on human skin parchment. I
wouldn't expect to be palmed off with 'this bit is tricky, go read
some books', I'd expect the software to do just about everything,
explain what it was doing in the language of your choice, and give you
a backrub at the same time.

 I'm flabbergasted that a solution for what is probably not one of the
richest universities in the world is going to tie them to one of the
most expensive geostats packages I've ever seen. I'm staring at this
pricetag on the ESRI web site because I just feel like I must be
hallucinating. But I'm not. Two and a half THOUSAND dollars. Oh, and
you need an ArcView license as well, a mere snip at one and half
thousand dollars. Zimbabwe dollars? No, US dollars. I checked.

 I'm guessing you can't rethink your plans at this point, but you
could consider pointing out to students that free, cross-platform,
high-quality, open-source, well-documented software for statistics and
geostatistics is available to download from www.r-project.org, and
there's a friendly bunch of people willing to answer sensible
questions on the mailing list (including those professors who make it
their business to echo 'please read the posting guide' all the time).

 Hope this doesn't come over as too much of a rant, but I'm running a
course on Open-Source GeoSpatial Software in November and I think I
may have just found a nice counter-example :)

Barry
 [think I need a cup of tea and a lie-down now]