Re: Recommendations:GIS program in Ada

[tatebll@aol.com (Bill Tate)]

"Eric G. Miller" <egm2@jps-nospam.net> wrote in message 
 
> Why would you care if the software was written in Ada?  It's not likely
> any of the vendors would give you access to their source anyway.

No but they do often have api's however, and their api's are written
for VB, C++, C or other languages that support MS COM (ugh).  And I
happen to like Ada :>)

> Good Luck.  GIS's are fairly complex creatures.  

After 6 years of GIS development, I'm keenly aware of what you speak
but I also don't intend tackle the entire mountain either.

> BTW: what "business analyst" functionality are you looking for that >commercial vendors are not providing?

Let me clarify my earlier comment.  Its not that there aren't any
vendors that provide business analyst functionality.  Rather its what
I define as required functionality often gets split across multiple
add-ons or product extensions.  Taken in whole, this tends to become
an expensive proposition.  What I'm doing is entirely a non-commercial
effort but important to do my work.

In terms of an example.  The one most pertinent to me entails
combining GIS functionality with modeling/analysis techniques such as
neural networks and Kohonen's Self-Organizing Map, in particular.  The
latter being a useful method for clustering & visualizing highly
dimensional data; data which often happens to have an important
geographic context to it.  The combination of both is useful to me
because of how I tend to organize, analyze, and visualize information.