Since 2005, Inventis has worked with organizations who have reduced human, material and financial resources. Our clients usually want the best of both worlds. They have no money to spend on buying complex software but they want to get the job done quickly and easily.
One day, we were having a discussion about this eternal issue. We came up with four sentences who summarize the situation :
- Clients are constantly looking for solutions that can save time and money.
- Existing commercial products are very complete. In fact, they’re so complete that they exceed actual needs.
- Commercial products are easy to use, but very expensive. Consequently, few organizations can afford to buy them.
- Open source applications are free but often very user-unfriendly.
- Open source applications have the reputation of being reserved for experts in computer science or programming.
That’s where the idea is born. We wanted to provide geomatics users (forestry, FM, Oil & gas, local governments, private enterprises, etc.), an easy-to-use and free alternative to commercial software dedicated to the processing and manipulation of geospatial data.
That’s why Inventis’ developers created this application named ogr2gui. We went from an existing command line program named ogr2ogr to a friendly GUI, flexible and intuitive, responding to more than 95% of usual needs.
Since version 0.1, released in September 2008, hundreds of people located in over 42 countries have adopted ogr2gui. Mainly used in France, Quebec, Switzerland and Belgium, ogr2gui is also used by Canadian universities, U.S. government agencies, Italian and Polish organizations as well as private companies in Germany, Norway, Spain and South America.