mezoGIS - General Information
============================

mezoGIS is a GIS application, a graphical interface to query and analyse
spatial data. mezoGIS does not store or compute data directly, but operates
external PostGIS databases. The goal of mezoGIS is to provide a tool for
geospatial analysis with PostGIS, through on-the-fly SQL queries as well as
through larger, external plugin scripts.

There are other, excellent open source applications that can display PostGIS
datasets (like QGis or GRASS). Those projects, however, expect properly indexed
tables as an input, and don't provide a built in functionality to launch SQL
queries. The focus of mezoGIS is to stay close to the SQL workflow: Spatial
queries are launched through manually entered SQL commands, and result sets
containing geometry are displayed as map layers.

mezoGIS is entirely written in the python programming language, for gtk+. It
works fine on the GNOME Desktop, and has not yet been tested on other desktops
or platforms. mezoGIS can be downloaded from its website:

    http://www.mezogis.org

mezoGIS is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), see the file
'COPYING' for more information.

If you have suggestions or find bugs, feel welcome to contact me via email at
fredericback@gmail.com.


Installation
============

To install mezoGIS, run "python setup.py install".

mezoGIS currently has the following requirements:

    * PyGTK 2.8 and and Pycairo 1.0.0: Both are provided by default on most
      distributions. 

    * psycopg: A python module to access PostgreSQL databases.

    * GeoTypes 0.6.0: A python module that implements support for PostGis data
      types. Get it here: http://initd.org/tracker/psycopg/wiki/GeoTypes

    * PostGIS. Without PostGIS, mezoGIS is naked.

