Re: Recommendations:GIS program in Ada

["Eric G. Miller" <egm2@jps-nospam.net>]

In <cb4ba455.0209060509.3c27cb7e@posting.google.com>, Bill Tate wrote:

> "Eric G. Miller" <egm2@jps-nospam.net> wrote in message 

>> 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.

Well, I'd be interested to see where you go with the idea.  I've
spent a little time working on GRASS (mostly ferreting out obscure bugs
in a hacked up 20+ year old C code base).  Part of that experience
has led me to Ada, though I must admit I haven't gone too far with it -
managed to write a line segment intersector and haven't returned to it...

> 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.

Yes, this "extension" business is clearly a way to fsck customers out
of there money.  I've been distinctly unimpressed with the amount of
functionality actually present in some of these $1500 dollar "extensions".

> 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. 

Hmmm, must research this Kohonen thing...