ILWIS, THE FREE  USER-FRIENDLY RASTER AND VECTOR  GIS

GREAT NEWS: ILWIS 3.6.01 IS OUT WITH FEATURES NEW CAPABILITIES:

	Full integration of GDAL, a library that offers access to many raster formats;
	Access to Postgres/gis databases for data and maps;
	Extension and improvements of the SEBS functionality.

If you already downloaded ILWIS 3.6, you need to download it again. There were a number of bugs that needed fixing. So please download ILIWIS 3.6.01

We particularly like to thank Martin Schouwenburg and everybody else that have tirelessly worked at making these very important improvements on ILWIS. Check what's new for ILWIS 3.6

This website promotes the use of the free open source GIS software "Integrated Land and Water Information System, ILWIS, the world's most user-friendly integrated software with raster processing capabilities to work on remotely sensed satellite images and vector processing capabilities for making vector maps and countless spacial modeling abilities. Its fully integrated raster and vector approach and user-friendlyness make it particularly suitable for natural resources managers, field scientists, biologists, ecologists, etc., as well as for educators. But don't be mistaken, ILWIS is incredibly versatile and powerful. Some of the key futures of ILWIS are: 

Key features

1. Vector and Raster capacity integrated into 1 software package

2. Developed by an autonomous higher education institution under the Dutch government

3. Initiated in 1984 with a subsidy from the Ministry of Development cooperation, ILWIS is one of the oldest GIS programmes around

4. With both vector and raster integrated into one package, it takes less time to learn to use the programme

5. Being developed by a training institute, ILWIS has always been tested for its user-friendliness for more than 2 decades on thousands of students 

6. The biggest savings in using ILWIS is in its greater use efficiency, thus saving costly production time

7. Free open source software available for downloading by anyone

8. More than 2 decades of development now continued by 52North, a consortium of open source developers

9. No costly periodic updates required like for the commercial packages;

10. Some of the greatest selections of  import  and export modules of widely used data formats

11. On-screen and tablet digitizing

12. Comprehensive set of image processing tools

13. Orthophoto, image georeferencing, transformation and mosaicing

14. Advanced modeling and spatial data analysis

15. 3D visualization with interactive editing for optimal view findings

16. Rich projection and coordinate system library

17. Geo-statistical analyses, with Kriging for improved interpolation

18. Production and visualization of stereo image pairs

19. Spatial Multiple Criteria Evaluation

20. More than 2,000 pages in the help

21. Very extensive training documents with training files.

Updates

Major updates become available about every half year or so. But minor updates with bug fixes appear more frequently. We suggest you get the latest version on line every 3 months or so, to make sure that you have the latest version available.

Number of ILWIS Users

The use of ILWIS is growing rapidly, as can be seen from our download statistics since we launched facilitated the possibility to download ILWIS in July 2007:

More than 15 000 times, ILWIS has been downloaded from this site and now a similar number of people have the opportunity to develop their GIS skills. If these people would have had to purchase packages with similar abilities to handle both raster and vector from the market leaders, they would have had to spend an estimated 14,000 X 12,000 ( the costs of 1 vector + 1 mid-range raster license) = $180,000,000! All these people now have vector and raster software for free! And that is just from this site. About double that number of programmes are downloaded monthly from http://www.52north.org. So we are probably looking at 30 000 to 40 000 ILWIS users worldwide. We like to thank the dedicated workers at the ITC, and particularly Martin Schouwenburg to tirelessly working at continuously improving ILWIS.   

ILWIS.org, Nature Worldwide, Birdlist and Fatbirder collaborate closely. We provide all sorts of information on nature conservation.