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

[Roger Bivand]

On Sat, 6 Sep 2008, Barry Rowlingson wrote:

> 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]

And FOSS4G 2008 is about to happen in Cape Town!

http://conference.osgeo.org/index.php/foss4g/2008

Just think what these young scientists could do with QGIS/GRASS/R/gstat 
or other suitable toolchains!

However, I've seen similar things, I'm afraid they may be being driven by 
clueless "donor" organisations.

I've just put the tea on ...

Roger

>
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-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no