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

[G. Allegri]

I faced the problem of collecting informations about ArcGIS Geospatial
extension while I was following the geostatics course at university. A
month looking for documentation about what was behind the scene, but
nothing... Just basics explanations about kriging. That's when I've
discovered gstat!

In the Institute I come from ArcGIS/ArcInfo is the most widely used
system, for cartography and geoDB management. But nobody would use it
for geostatistical analysis! Ok, IDW, or other simple interpolations,
but nothing beyond this.
The only reason I would spend money for commercial software can be
Geovariances software (in the Institute they use Isatis) [1], nothing
else.

Giovanni

[1] http://www.geovariances.com/

2008/9/6 Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no>:
> 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
>
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