Great Introductory GIS Tutorial And Screencast Seriesm, Discovering Qgis - an open-source mapping app for windows and macs!

I’ve downloaded The Department of Land Affair’s (Eastern Cape, South Africa) tutorial and within a few minutes I felt that it was more clear than GIS for Dummies in terms of explaining the very technical basics of GIS mapping. The tutorial includes worksheets and videos. You can download all the worksheets (pdf or odt) at once also near the bottom of the page.

I’ve also discovered Quantum GIS’s open source mapping software for macs and windows! and Qgis is an active mapping community, hosting an upcoming Qgis Developer’s conference in Vienna this coming November. That’s always a great sign! So I’ve downloaded version 1.3.0-3 standalone OSX Leopard (minus GRASS). I’ve installed the app, opened it, and stared it. I have no idea what to do now but I’m looking forward to marking out a day in December to sit down with the tutorial and software.

(via Free Geography Tools)

Great Introductory GIS Tutorial And Screencast Series

The Department of Land Affairs, Eastern Cape, South Africa has created a terrific tutorial series on GIS called “introducing GIS”. PDF worksheets and video screencasts cover topics like vector and raster data, attributes, topology, coordinate systems, map production and spatial analysis in a clear and easy-to-follow fashion. The worksheets are freely distributable under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, while the screencasts are released under Creative Commons. While you can watch the screencasts in your browser, they are a bit small – I would recommend downloading them so that you can open them in a stand-alone video viewer that you can resize to larger dimensions for easier viewing. Right-click on the video link and choose “Save as”. For that matter, if you download all the screencasts and worksheets and put them on a DVD, you have a great educational resource to share and distribute.

The site has a custom Windows installer of the open source GIS Quantum GIS, including the data presented in the tutorials. However, Quantum GIS also runs on Mac and Linux, and they offer the tutorial data as a separate download; find the link at the bottom of the web page. For that matter, the Quantum GIS Windows installer they have is version 1.0.2, while the most recent stable release version for Windows is 1.2.0-1. So even if you have Windows, you may want to download the data separately, and install the most recent version of Quantum GIS using the osgeo4w installer.