Luc Anselin, University of Illinois, and Sergio J. Rey, San Diego State University

This paper presents two open source software tools to visualize and explore spatial data and to carry out spatial econometric analysis. openGeoDa is the cross-platform open source successor to the GeoDa package, is written in C++ and primarily aimed at data exploration. PySAL is a library of modules for spatial data analysis written in Python. It is intended to provide a comprehensive and flexible toolbox for a range of spatial data analyses, including visualization, rate smoothing, clustering, space-time exploration and spatial regression. The library can be combined with different graphical front ends, such as STARS (using Tk) and PySpace (using wxPython). The paper reviews the different architectures of the two approaches, their respective strengths and weaknesses and provides some illustrative examples.

Last updated January 6, 2006