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

Sat Sep 6 22:14:06 CEST 2008

Nothing else to say after Barry's email, apart from noting yet another
wonder of the free software world/community:

we even use our mailing lists to provide advice on commercial software!!!
Uau!

Would the reverse be true?

Paulo Justiniano Ribeiro Jr
LEG (Laboratorio de Estatistica e Geoinformacao)
Universidade Federal do Parana
Caixa Postal 19.081
CEP 81.531-990
Curitiba, PR  -  Brasil
Tel: (+55) 41 3361 3573
Fax: (+55) 41 3361 3141
e-mail: paulojus AT  ufpr  br
http://www.leg.ufpr.br/~paulojus

On Sat, 6 Sep 2008, Christopher Paciorek wrote:

>  This is a bit of a distant memory from a few years back when I also was trying to better understand what ArcGIS was actually doing, but I believe there is some, though probably not a large amount of, additional technical detail available in the following ESRI manuals:
>
> Johnston, K. et al. 2001. Using ArcGIS geostatistical analyst. Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute.
> McCoy, J. et al. 2001. Using ArcGIS spatial analyst. Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute.
>
> I don't think I was able to find these online as I have a memory of tracking them down through the university map library.
>
> -chris
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Chris Paciorek / Asst. Professor        Email: paciorek at hsph.harvard.edu
> Department of Biostatistics             Voice: 617-432-4912
> Harvard School of Public Health         Fax:   617-432-5619
> 655 Huntington Av., Bldg. 2-407         WWW: www.biostat.harvard.edu/~paciorek
> Boston, MA 02115 USA                    Permanent forward: paciorek at alumni.cmu.edu
>
>
> >>> "G. Allegri" <giohappy at gmail.com> 09/06/08 1:45 PM >>>
> 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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> >> R- sig- Geo at stat.math.ethz.ch
> >> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r- sig- geo
> >>
> >
> > --
> > 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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> >
>
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