3.2 Detailed results

ARCINFO and ARCVIEW were the most popular GIS packages in use based on questionnaire replies - 12 users reported using ARCINFO and a further 10 ARCVIEW. We received reports on the use of IDRISI and Map Info by four users each and two reports on the use of ERDAS IMAGINE. We received just one report on the use of the other GIS software listed below. We have also received comments from ERDAS (UK) Limited on the views of ERDAS IMAGINE posted.

GIS software was used most commonly in geography. Over half of our questionnaire replies in this software group came from geographers working in geography departments. Five users in archaeology reported using GIS software in their work. In other areas of the social sciences the use of GIS technology was rare.

Responses were received for the following software.

ARCINFO

ARCINFO was the most popular GIS package in use in the social sciences. It was either used in research or both teaching and research. Almost universally ARCINFO was regarded as a very useful tool. Equally, it was almost universally regarded as being difficult or very difficult to use.

Specific uses:

• To create coverages of study locations, and create hazard assessment models to determine the area's risk from soil erosion.
• M.A. GIS teaching
• M.Phil. GIS teaching
• Teaching GIS in Archaeology
• In BFC VRCIS, part of a JISC/JTAP funded project "the virtual field course"

• Coverage creation
• Digitising modules
• Editing digitised topologies
• Calculation of areas
• Map overlays
• Vector/raster conversion
• Grid modelling
• Plotting
• Analysis
• Map generation
• Interactive map querying
• Database querying

• Main GIS used in industry
• Available under CHEST agreement
• Able to handle large volumes of data
• Extensive facilities available
• Multi-platform availability.
• Existence of digitised boundary data in ARCINFO format

• The considerable learning curve
• The poor windows interface - mostly command line driven - students expect a GUI.
• INFO database system is inflexible
• Limited, sometimes poor analysis capabilities
• Big and slow

• New GUI version
• Full windows version instead of DOS program
• From a visualisation point of view more tools for 3D modelling and visualisation and linked displays for exploratory analysis
• Better 'grid' analysis
• VRML support
• Internet map server technology

• 'It can do almost anything a GIS system should do.'
• 'Research use, with many one-off operations, usually requires use of the command line or programming interfaces, which require a high degree of familiarity with the system.'
• 'Once you know the commands it is a very easy package to use, with and excellent Menu driven help system.'

ARCVIEW was one of the most popular GIS packages in use. ARCVIEW tended to be used in research or both teaching and research. It was regarded as being either a 'useful' or 'very useful' tool. Views on user-friendliness varied. One respondent felt that the software was very easy to use. The general consensus was that ARCVIEW was fairly difficult to master however. Specific uses of ARCVIEW included:

• In an introductory geography course.
• A course in GIS techniques
• Teaching GIS in Archaeology
• In a GIS course for post graduates
• ' I have used it for applications raging from generating data which was used in predictive modelling of archaeological site location to determining the carrying capacity for large general stores in a city area.'

• Tabular database creation
• Mapping attributes
• Map Display
• Map query
• Importing coverages
• Charting function
• Query building
• Spatial analysis
• 3D analysis
• Map generation for hard copy
• Customisation, extension

• Low cost software
• Visual appeal
• Quick display of data
• Easy to use and quick for the students to learn
• The ease with which ARCINFO coverages can be manipulated
• Version 3 was reported to be 'much better than previous versions - it can do useful things like spatial analysis!'
• Much easier to use than ARCINFO

• Limited functionality compared to a full GIS package
• Poor paper manual
• The package is large and slow to run over the network
• Error messages are uninformative or non-existent
• Reported problems in importing postscript files
• Not fully compatible with Microsoft's office for writing reports, etc

• Better graphics
• Ability to accept more data formats
• More GIS operations e.g. a reliable buffer and clip for polygons and lines
• Better database functions
• More statistical abilities
• Develop along the lines of ARCINFO in terms of functionality but on a PC with a Windows interface

• 'NT has been a godsend as before ArcInfo and ArcView had to run under Unix to be useful.'
• 'I attended a two-day training course run by ESRI, then was on my own. I learnt enough of ArcView to create 3 data workshops for use in class and to teach students.'
• 'Though many features are fairly easy, I really have yet to see a GIS which is easy to use.'

CDV

CDV was written in TCL by Jason Dykes, as part of the JISC/NTI project. The software runs under Windows 95 or UNIX and was considered to be both very useful and very easy to use. One of the less widely used GIS packages used in both teaching and research. CDV was used for:

• Highly interactive mapping
• Census data visualisation

• Multiple representations
• Object linking on screen
• Highly flexible

• Not 'production' quality
• Lacks things like a frame, scale, north point etc

ERDAS Imaging A GIS package designed to plan for surface change such as urban development, transport planning and landscape planning.

We received two questionnaires discussing the use of ERDAS Imaging. Both users felt that the software was very useful but fairly difficult to use. One respondent wrote 'Very hard to start off with, but once you have conquered the initial problems it becomes a lot easier.' Specifically ERDAS was used in M.Phil. GIS teaching and Ph.D. research projects.

Applications used included:

• Image processing
• Image manipulation including orthorectification
• Image classification
• Image overlaying and merging
• Image display
• Visualisation of Satellite imagery
• Analysis of Imagery

We have also received comments from the General Manager of Erdas (UK) Limited, Jonathan Shears, on the views posted. He states that

'ERDAS has been the primary Geographic Imaging software application for the higher education market since it was selected by CHEST in 1993 following an extensive survey by the IUSC Graphics Working Party which was funded by AGOCG. Over 50 universities now use ERDAS IMAGINE for both teaching and research, making it the most popular image processing application for the higher education market. ERDAS have pledged to include all new ERDAS owned software modules in this deal as they become available and recently this has included IMAGINE VirtualGIS - a powerful 3D visualisation tool which is pertinent to this survey, given its wide adoption.' 'Our users tend to be in earth science related applications - typically geography, geology and environmental science, however it is not limited to this . . .'.

In a separate e-mail to the visualisation-tools list Jon states

'It [ERDAS IMAGINE] links very well with ARC/INFO (also available through CHEST) on account of a unique technology exchange agreement between ERDAS and ESRI. Unlike Excel or SPSS, IMAGINE visualises pixel based datasets, rather than information from an underlying database, which is more the domain of GIS applications. As an inherently image based application, IMAGINE's visualisation tools therefore provide image panning, zooming, rotation, geographic linking of multiple windows, image overlay and transparency control for change detection studies.'

ER Mapper

ER Mapper was one of the less frequently used GIS packages. One respondent reported the use of the software in research for satellite image processing. ER Mapper was described as being 'fairly easy' to use and 'quite useful'. Particular advantages were listed as:

• Ease of use
• Good human interface
• Ease of installation
• Low memory usage and good swap space handling.
• Simple handling of the dataset
• Large array of filtering algorithms
• Effectively scriptable

• Not very stable - liable to crash
• Print and export are not very efficient or reliable

A computer cartographic package with the capability in addition to create a range of business graphics. Once widely used. Now it is being superseded by newer software and this is reflected in that only one questionnaire was received making reference to the software. Initially GIMMS would only run on mainframe computers. However, it has now been available for PCs for some time, first running under DOS and later under Windows - but effectively in a DOS window.

The software is not as easy to use or to learn as full windows mapping packages such as ARCVIEW. The command language is complex and it takes some time to become familiar with it. There are some specific problems. On fast PCs a plug-in dongle restricting use of the software under licence may not be recognised. Colour output is fairly poor and the range of fill patterns are very limited. Although a range of text fonts are available text output can be of poor quality. Postscript files are large. Software bugs were also reported

GIMMS was mainly used for creating maps, creating graphics and for the importing and exporting of boundary files.

On the positive side, GIMMS was regarded as largely providing good results with the capability to produce maps rapidly. Once the command language has been learnt it can be flexible. Users are reluctant to give the package up having spent so much time mastering it. In its time it was before its time. Software design has moved on.

IDRISI

An inexpensive raster GIS for introducing GIS concepts to students. Based on our survey results IDRISI was in the 'second division' of GIS packages based on usage. IDRISI was not used as extensively as software such as ARCINFO but it was in more common use than a number of other software packages.

IDRISI was used both in teaching - in GIS and Remote Sensing courses - and in research and consultancy. IDRISI was described as 'Ideal for teaching-conceptually simple'. It was considered to be fairly useful and reasonably easy to use.

The main advantages of IDRISI were listed as:

• Easy to use
• Inexpensive - exceptionally wide functionality for such low-cost software.
• Robust
• Good mailing list support
• Good documentation (on line and on paper)
• Good geographical analysis features
• Minimal hard disk requirements
• Hard for students to make errors which are not easily recovered
• Standard Windows menu system means shallow learning curve.
• Actual use is very close to conceptual idea of GIS
• Lots of 3rd party modules.

• Image display
• Overlay
• Plotting
• Buffering

• VRML support
• Better printing capability
• NTF format filter
• Algorithms such as triangulation
• Better orthographic display
• NT 4 version at a more competitive price

MapInfo is used fairly extensively for both teaching and research. Whilst most users found the software to be useful a number reported that the software was difficult to use and the documentation poor.

Specifically cited uses included:

• To create political thematic maps of Russia showing, for example, the distribution of population, average wage, etc. in 89 regions. This is for a book but MapInfo has also been used for some presentation, papers and an article.
• Introduction to commercial mapping 1st and 2nd year students.
• Introductory GIS - 2nd year.
• 3rd Year projects and Dissertation work
• Used to teach modules in: Geodemographics and GIS for Business

• Thematic maps
• Vector mapping
• Raster Mapping
• Buffering
• Creation of new points and regions
• Data integration
• Structured Query Language selection of data
• Layouts for professional output
• Visualisation of previously hidden patterns
• Graphing

• Will link to data in software such as Excel, Access and SPSS
• Excellent output
• Ability to embed images to Word Document

• Very difficult to learn. One respondent wrote 'Learning the Software was a disaster.'
• One Windows 95 version was reported to have serious bugs.
• Very poor documentation
• Inability to complete certain complex tasks
• High system requirements and greedy for disk space
• Software and data are very expensive
• Inconsistent treatment of objects
• Poor handling of free text data
• Limited spatial analysis tools
• Absence of link-node topology
• Limited implementation of georelational data model.
• Price

• It would be far more useful if it were easier to use.
• Embedding of robust statistical techniques for analysis of temporo-spatial clustering.
• Better raster handling is needed.
• Resolve the problems mentioned above.

We received one brief report on the use of MapMaker in Geography running on Windows NT 3.5

The software was used in both teaching and research for mapping data. Its main advantage was that it could produce accurate maps. However, MapMaker was not as user friendly as it could be. Students had difficulty navigating through menus which were not always logically ordered. There was no database direct linkage internal to the package and output quality was not always satisfactory.

3.2.7 WWW software

The survey highlighted as an area of interest World Wide Web software. We were curious to learn of the use to which the web was being put in the social sciences to assist in visualisation. We expected some general comments on the utility of browsers such and Netscape and Explorer. We further expected mention of the use of static images in the form of gifs (and animated gifs) and JPGs, video technology such and AVI and MPEG, and other technologies such as Java, VMRL etc.

In fact, we received one questionnaire reply making brief mention of the use of Netscape. Amongst most social scientists our findings indicate that the WWW is not important in terms of data visualisation.

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