Hi,

Computers have been used to analyse several geographical factors(in my case I need to measure ndvi index to measure plant growth.)

Can anybody help me out .how is GIS used .Are there any alternatives to using GIS .And does anyone know any GIS information repositories.

(I program in java,so would appreciate it if the replies would use this language)

 

I know this is a more ecology topic but I anyone could offer a better( yet simple) way of estimating plant growth in a region, I would would be thankfull.

What's GIS? Is this something I would know if I studied geography at anything more than a wikipedia level?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system

GIS stands for global informatics system this is a link to the wikipedia article on it. It is basically a system which stores data about the ground, water bodies ,etc.I am not adverse to using any other form of information for ndvi but I need highly detailed info.(i.e. each sq k.m (you get the idea)).

Well, that was rather stupid of me. It was right in your thread title. I'm sorry, mate. As you've probably ascertained by now, I'm not going to be able to assist you here. Hopefully someone else will happen along, see this thread, and offer you something useful. Sorry for the short distraction/tangent.

do you have the db already and you're building a system to handle the queries into it, or are you building a system from scratch to collect inputs from various sources (satellites, etc)?

 

I found this: http://opensourcegis.org/ which has a few open source GIS systems in a few programming languages. Maybe it can help?