Need an OS GIS Software?

ILWIS of ITC has migrated to Open Source Software since July 1st 2007. Before going a bit further, do not forget that ILWIS stands for Integrated Land and Water Information Systems. Named related with land and water but of course the capabilities of this software are not limited to natural resources management only. ILWIS can be useful for risk assessment and urban planning. So it has many important tools right. Good news is you can download it for free now !

One of my favorite applications in ILWIS is SMCE: Spatial Multi Criteria Evaluation that allows the user to overlay maps and give different score / value to each map. Normally this is done by making a decision making criteria .

It is a good news for someone who is using raster data a lot. ILWIS has a lot of capabilities data in Geographic Information System (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS), in particular for maintaining raster data. ILWIS is very good in dealing with raster data but not so much for vector. ARC-GIS ESRI does much better in vector based data but poor in raster.

Users of ILWIS are normally students of ITC, former students and sister institutes. BUT I agree by this decision because then more users may be interested to make use of ILWIS. You can download ILWIS at

http://52north.org/index.php?option=com_projects&task=showProject&id=30&Itemid=127

or temporarily at:

http://www.itc.nl/ilwis/downloads/default.asp

I have used ILWIS for many GIS exercises. In the beginning it may not be as user friendly as ArcGIS of ESRI. However ILWIS can do analyses that ArcGIS can’t do. You need to remember some commands in using the ILWIS. Actually the commands can be recalled. There are tools inside ILWIS. But if you remember the commands than it can speed up your work.