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by digitalzombie 3399 days ago
Ugh... ESRI, is the one reason why I didn't get into Geography. I wanted get into datascience that lean toward maps but seeing the monopoly that ESRI has and no open source alternative it was clear, in my opinion, that that market growth is will be slow and the potential will not be as great.

I'm leaning toward medical data and NLP now.
3 comments
jlarocco 3399 days ago
I don't quite understand what you're saying. Using proprietary or open source software isn't a determining factor in whether the industry using it will grow quickly or slowly. For example, most computer animation software (Maya, SoftImage, ...) is closed source, but CGI in films and TV has experienced huge growth in the last 20 years.

In any case, even though ESRI is the market leader, there's quite a bit of open source GIS software (GRSS, QGis, PostGis, etc.). Entrenched markets like that don't get "disrupted" by magic, it requires people to jump in and use the alternatives on real projects.

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maxerickson 3399 days ago
OpenStreetMap would be fine as the base map there. There's nice clean tiles available from several providers.

And while I am not experienced with them, I believe both Leaflet and OpenLayers would work well to build the interactive part of the map.

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everybodyknows 3399 days ago
Example of a data set visualized with Leaflet by a US Federal agency:

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/

Suffers from a few scaling pains.

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sarcher 3399 days ago
jlarocco laid out a few of the open source options (all of which are quite good at this stage), and when it comes to web mapping I would say ESRI is well matched by Mapbox, CARTO, etc.

If you're looking for a specific non-ESRI tool, post about it and I'm sure you'll get some interesting feedback.

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