As part of the learning process for Module 4, GIS and Spatial Analysis, we will be exploring a range of different flavours of GIS software beyond ArcGIS, much of it opensource, and therefore free, and some of it in its freely available demo version.
The aim is to both broaden your experience of GIS softwares and explore some of those (few) things at which Arc is not so good. At various points, either in the lectures and exercises, in supplementary material or in this blog, we'll be using Surfer, Landserf and 3DEM for surface modelling, and exploring Quantum GIS, SagaGIS, GRASS and Opticks as supplementary GIS and image processing packages. I'll explore each of these in more detail in due course in dedicated blog posts, but for now you might care to download and install each on your local system so as to be prepared.
Links for the homepage/download site for each are listed below:
Landserf http://www.landserf.org/
Quantum GIS http://www.qgis.org/
