Re:Watertight vector maps from raster images
by Waterluvian on Saturday April 10, 2021 @10:32PM
(#26767071)
I hear you. Based on my experience with what my peers poke me for help with, a considerable amount can be done with just support for the most common features:
GeoTIFF, GeoJSON, CRS/projection support (OpenLayers handles this quite well already), tabular and spatial joins, filters, buffer/intersect.
A concern I think we share is that you'll always need that one, less common feature to get to the finish line. This may be. But I haven't found it to be the case as often as I worried. A lot of questions are really just about "how does X relate to Y?" where the linkage is space, time, or some other attribute.
> QGIS is often too heavy or inaccessible
The reasoning is the contradiction here. While most GIS work is conceptually simple, there's so many things people want to do - any new GIS program will either feel incomplete or end up getting incredibly bloated and complex (per QGIS). Try dealing with raster+vector, different file formats, different databases, projection systems, different web service standards, tiling formats, 2d+3d+temporal visualisation, proprietary libraries for particular analysis, etc. etc.
Not to say QGIS can't be improved or a better webGIS wouldn't be helpful, but its a tough task to do so many things even if it all seems conceptually simple.
Lets not forget QGIS itself was basically a clean-slate approach which started much less able than previous open source GIS (Grass).