Software

Geospatial capabilities can be found in many different types of software.

  • Desktop GIS programs like QGIS and ArcGIS provide a comprehensive suite of tools for creating or editing geospatial data, performing analysis, and producing maps.
  • Web platforms such as Carto provide hosting for dynamic web maps. The QGIS plugin "qgis2web" can be used to generate the files needed for an interactive webmap, which could be hosted on your own server, or via GitHub pages.
  • Programming languages such as R and Python have many packages for working with geospatial data.
  • Specialized GIS software includes PostGIS (spatial database) and GDAL/OGR (command-line tools), which are often used from within a desktop GIS program.