In recent years, a noticeable number of new Free and Open Source Desktop GIS (FOSGIS) have emerged on the market. As FOSGIS have been widely used in the field of Internet GIS/Web Mapping, this is still not true for desktop GIS. Here the market is still dominated by proprietary products. Even though there is the trend to shift also geo-processing to the Internet, for sophisticated analysis as well as rich clients in a GDI environment, there will be still the necessity for desktop GIS in the future. This holds in particular for many developing countries, where still the availability of broad bandwidth for Internet applications is a problem.

In the workshop, a short overview of the different desktop FOSGIS projects and their status of development will be given. This presentation will be followed by a hands-on workshop; here an introduction to the Software gvSIG will be given. An environmental analysis will be developed together with the participants, so that they will be able to gather their own feelings and impressions on the software.