No subject

technologically, GIS have been developed partly by
geoscientists and partly by hired programmers. Sometimes,
the "techies" have had their way with the terminology.
The other problem is the sheer complexity of the topic.

It has been my experience that the learning-by-doing
approach and "intuition" are bound to fail=20
in the case of GIS. As a GIS teacher, I have given
up on trying to hide the complexities of GIS and instead
expose students to the hard core technical concepts from
the beginning. This has worked far better than previous
attempts at masking technical details.

For these reasons, I am not a believer in masking the
de facto complexity of GIS with a GUI, either. Sooner
or later, that approach is bound to backfire.

Let's not forget that GIS is by nature a collaborative
thing. Much of the complexity of the GIS data structures
springs from the fact that datasources have to be organized
and managed in a way which allows teams to work on them
at the same time. It is seldom possible to achieve all
GIS tasks with just one software. So even if we manage
to create a super user-friendly GIS that manages to elegantly
mask all data management complexities with a slick GUI
-- the user would be stumped again the moment he/she needs
to use another GIS tool in addition to get the work done.

My advice is: don't be frustrated by the stretched-out
learning curve of GIS, and keep going.
The rewards are increased flexibility and true understanding
of what your are doing, instead of "you need to click this=20
button" style "knowledge".

As far as user friendliness goes, gvSIG compares quite
favorably with other GIS. But it is also one of those GIS
that pretty much assume you know what you are doing. Good
for advanced users, but somewhat confusing and intimidating
for beginners, perhaps. I for one like it that way.

Cheers,

Ben

----- Original Message -----
> Hello Klaus,
> the problem you had is one of the most common ones for people
> beginning with gvSIG (and other Desktop GIS like ArcView 3 or ArcGIS).
> Maybe we should give it a try and thinking about the possibility to
> rename this functionality.
> Kind regards
> Jose
>=20
> -- Jos=C3=A9 Antonio Canalejo Alonso
> CSGIS
> Email:jose.canalejo at csgis.de
> Web: http://www.csgis.de
>=20
>=20
>=20
>=20
>=20
> De: Klaus Schaefer <klaus.schaefer4 at giz.de>
> Para: gvsig_internacional at listserv.gva.es
> Enviado: mi=C3=A9,3 agosto, 2011 07:39
> Asunto: Re: [Gvsig_english] copying shape file layers
>=20
> Simon - thanks for your support
>=20
> I was thinking about formulating a very similar reply but finally
> didn't want to extend this thread endless...
>=20
> However, I'm an IT person, having been working for long years as IT
> consultant. I've used hundreds of applications with copy functions.
> They've always done what I expected.
>=20
> I'm working with GIS/gvSIG since about a year now. However, I may not
> use it
> that frequent and to an extend many of you do. That's why I apologise
> not to
> be a GIS-guru and sometimes ask strange questions... Now I learned
> that the
> GIS community has a little bit different understanding what a copy
> does (has
> to do). OK, I had to learn it the hard way...
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> BTW, I love gvSIG. It really comforts my needs and I'm promoting it
> strongly to the people I work with. Sometimes I'm sometimes only
> wondering that - in
> my eyes - relative simple functions do not work as expected or I even
> cannot get them to work at all (e.g. moving points in a layer -
> there's a thread in
> this forum as well. I had even gurus looking into it on my system,
> without success...) For sure - as a non GIS guru I usually expect
> functions to
> behave as in usual windows applications (even though I've worked with
> LINUX/UNIX as well).
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> Thanks a lot for all your support and clarification! I like you
> people, this
> forum (being a major source of competence and help) and the software
> as such!!!
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> Klaus
>=20
> -- View this message in context:
> http://osgeo-org.1803224.n2.nabble.com/copying-shape-file-layers-tp664369=
9p6647603.html
> Sent from the gvSIG users mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
> _______________________________________________ Gvsig_internacional
> mailing list
> Gvsig_internacional at listserv.gva.es
> http://listserv.gva.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gvsig_internacional
>=20
> _______________________________________________ Gvsig_internacional
> mailing list
> Gvsig_internacional at listserv.gva.es
> http://listserv.gva.es/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gvsig_internacional


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