[R-sig-Geo] R-SAGA-GRASS-ArcGIS strengths/weaknesses

[Anne Ghisla]

On Tue, 2008-09-16 at 13:34 +0200, Oehler, Friderike (AGPP) wrote:
> If a non-experienced person wanted to decide for one program in which to
> invest time and if one was to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of R,
> SAGA, GRASS and ArcGIS in comparison to each other in a simplistic way ... 
[...]
> 
> Of course, I am aware that these programs -particularly R vs. GIS-  serve
> different purposes, but supposing that you don't know any of these and you
> wanted to have a starting point to select your tool for basic spatial data
> analysis and mapping, would this table help?

Hello Friderike, 

I would suggest to add to the comparison table an item about support
(wiki, mailing lists, developers and users community), and consider also
how do some systems (R, GRASS and SAGA) can cooperate so that users can
run complex analysis without stepping to one program to another.

On R wiki there is a starting page about this kind of comparison:
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=tips:spatial-data:when_to_use

HTH,

Anne Ghisla
Student at Insubria University, Varese

> 
> Any comment/suggestion is most welcome,
> many thanks,
> Friderike
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