3D World Studio is a modeling program useful for visualizing real world data utilizing tools developed within computer gaming environments. The program allows you to create buildings and terrain and export your visualization into a variety of formats.
ArcGIS Desktop is a collection of software products for building complete geographic information systems (GIS). produced by Esri. ArcGIS Desktop 9 provides an integrated GIS, combining object-oriented and traditional file-based data models with a set of tools to create and work with geographic data. The following three applications comprise the ArcGIS Desktop software suite:
ArcGIS Explorer is a geographical information system (GIS) viewer to explore, visualize, and share GIS information. It provides a freely-distributable way to share products produced by ESRI's commercial products.
There are two versions: one for the desktop, the other on-line. The on-line version includes support for time-enabled maps.
ArcGIS Server is a component of the ESRI suite of commercial software focused on the ability to create, manage, and distribute GIS services over the Web to support desktop, mobile and Web mapping applications.
The user can choose from Basic, Standard, or Advanced editions of ArcGIS Server. Costs vary depending on the level of service required.
ESRI provides three application program interfaces (API) for embedding Internet mapping capabilities into websites. The JavaScript API requires only a text editor, while the Silverlight/WPF and Flex versions may require additional licensing/software (see additional information below). These applications can be used with many online GIS web services, including several offered free of charge at ArcGIS.com.
ArcMap is the map display and editing workhorse for the ESRI ArcGIS Geographical Information System (GIS) software package. It is most widely used for map creation, but also has broad capabilities for editing and analysis. The "Toolbox" available in ArcMap provides an encyclopedic array of GIS data manipulation and analysis functions for almost any application.
FRAGSTATS is a computer software program designed to work with geospatial data to help the user categorize landscape patterns and metrics, and is useful in identifying areas where land use activities have resulted in fragmentation of the landscape. The current release is version 3.3
The program is currently undergoing another major revamping, which will result in the release of version 4.0 sometime in 2011.
GeoServer is a Java-based Open Source software map server that enables the sharing and editing of geospatial data on the Internet via open standards. It implements the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Mapping Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards. It can serve data that can be displayed on common mapping client applications such as ArcMap, Google Maps, Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, and Microsoft Virtual Earth as well as Open Source applications such as OpenLayers and MapServer.
Google Earth is a flexible mapping and display tool that is installed on a local computer, and accesses on-line data sources provided by Google. These data sources include aerial imagery at a variety of scales and additional data hosted by Google. The user needs to have internet access to view the data provided by Google. Once Google Earth is installed it allows the user to "zoom in" and view satellite and photographic images on any place in the world.
Google Maps is web-based application that provides for web-enabled map creation. Google Maps includes a suite of supporting products including:
MapServer is an open source tool for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the web. It allows users to create “geographic image maps”, that is, maps that can direct users to content. MapServer uses Web Feature Services (WFS) that will serve out features and attributes to users and WMS (Web Mapping Service), that serves an 'image' of what the symbolized layers (gis datasets) look like on the server based on the extent requested. Users can implement python, java, perl, or .net programming languages to work with MapServer.
The MODIS Land Product Subsets tools provide summaries of selected MODIS Land Products for the community to use for validation of models and remove-sensing products and to characterize field sites. Users have several options to select the area of interest. The tools deliver spatial subsets of MODIS Land Data Products for small areas (<200 x 200 km) from 2000 to present. Output files contain pixel values of MODIS land products in text format and in GeoTIFF format. In addition, data visualizations (time series plots and grids showing single composite periods) are available.
Panoply is a cross-platform application which plots geo-gridded arrays from netCDF, HDF and GRIB datasets. It supports the following operations:
Quantum GIS (QGIS) is an open source Geographic Information System (GIS) that implements a large number of geospatial data access, visualization, processing, and analysis functions. It can access vector data stored in a wide variety of formats, including file-based (e.g. ESRI Shape Files, KML, GML), geodatabases (e.g.
The Taiwan Forestry Research Institute has produced a set of web-accessible tools that use Ecological Metadata Language (EML) documents to produce maps and statistical products. They are available at: http://metacat.tfri.gov.tw/modules.
