mezoGIS 0.1.5 review

mezoGIS project is a GIS application, a graphical interface to query and analyse spatial data

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Frederic Back

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mezoGIS project is a GIS application, a graphical interface to query and analyse spatial data. mezoGIS does not store or compute data directly, but operates external PostGIS databases. The goal of mezoGIS is to provide a tool for geo-spatial analysis with PostGIS, through on-the-fly SQL queries as well as through larger, external plugin scripts.

There are other, excellent open source applications that can display PostGIS data sets (like QGis or GRASS). Those projects, however, expect properly indexed tables as an input, and don't provide a built in functionality to launch SQL queries. The focus of mezoGIS is to stay close to the SQL workflow: Spatial queries are launched through manually entered SQL commands, and result sets containing geometry are displayed as map layers.

The first public release of mezoGIS was in march 2006. mezoGIS is entirely written in the python programming language, for gtk+. It works fine on the GNOME Desktop on linux, and has not yet been tested on other desktops or platforms.

Here are some key features of "mezoGIS":
Fast SQL queries: SQL commands and queries can be entered and sent to PostGIS within mezoGIS. Common SQL tasks and commands can also be accessed though context menues.
View any kind of result: SQL queries yield result tables. If such a table contains geometric data, mezoGIS will display it in a map. There is no need to copy the data into a table or to create spatial indices. This is very useful for on-the-fly geoanalysis.
Map creation: Result sets can be overlayed and layouted to create elaborate maps, the display engine currently has rough support for transparent colours, line styles, and symbols.
Plugin engine: Plugin scripts written in python can be loaded and executed. The API is only a very rudimentary implementation, and will be subject to substantial change.
XML file format: Projects are saved into an XML file format. The data itself is not stored, and must be reloaded from the database after loading.

Requirements:
GTK+ version 2.6.x
python 2.4
PyGTK 2.8
Pycairo 1.0.0
It also needs the psycopg and GeoTypes python modules; please refer to the homepage for information about where to get those modules.

What's New in This Release:
Unstable release.
It now supports raw labeling, graduated colours, and a general GUI upgrade.