What GIS system to use? 1

[ewithoud]

I am working on a new project at work where I believe we need a GIS system. However I am getting a bit lost with all the different systems out there. As I am new to GIS I was hoping I could get some help here.

The requirements we need are pretty basic, so I don't think we need a very expensive system.

We have a website we want populated with Geo Content. We have locations in europe which we want to link to POI's nearby.

So for instance there are 10 hotels in paris which are 10k's from the eiffel tower.
we would need a system where we can input certain POI's in france and also input certain hotel locations and then say for instance we want to mark all hotels in a 10k radius with a label 'eiffel tower' we can then use this as a content filter for our website.

also we want to do this with certain areas. ie we want to mark beaches, create our own vectors of that beach and then mark certain hotels as in walking distance of that beach.

This is the basic back end functionality we need. Also in the future we would like this to be graphically represented in a map (ie. google maps or similar).

What GIS system do you guys recommend that can do this?

Many Thanks,

Erik Withoud

 

[oharab]

This sort of system can be done without a fully fledged GIS system.
If all you are looking at doing is storing spatial data for display, then any of the spatially enabled databases will do that for you. I currently use Sql 2008 Express (which is free!) and it's ideal doing just what you are asking. It supports spatial indexing, so queries such as you've mentioned can be done very quickly. My system currently queries 750,000 POI's against polygons made from 30,000 vertices and still returns data in under 2 seconds!

Combined with Spatial ETL software such as Safe FME (which I can't reccommend enough) to easily transform and load the data will save you lots of time and will even produce tiles that can be combined with Virtual Earth/Google Maps with the minimum of fuss.

hth

Ben

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Ben O'Hara

http://www.RobotParade.co.uk

We could be confused in exactly the same way, but confusion might be like Nulls, and not comparable.

 

[ewithoud]

Hi Ben,

thanks for your help.

It seems we could use SQL 2008 for our proximity calculations. However we still need a way to draw vectors/polygons to mark beaches, or other areas of interest.

what do you recommend I use for this?

Thanks,

Erik

 

[oharab]

Spatial SQL will store polygons too without any issues. I've got boundaries in my current system made up of 10's of thousands of points.
If you're wanting users to draw custom polygons, then that can be done with VE or Google maps, quite easily, there are loads of tutorials out there (check out

http://code.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=65620&topic=11364

for a solution), but I agree, there will probably come a point when it's better to use Mapinfo or Esri, etc. and I don't know enough about any of those systems to be able to say where that point lies and which to go for.

Ben

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Ben O'Hara

http://www.RobotParade.co.uk

We could be confused in exactly the same way, but confusion might be like Nulls, and not comparable.