The Norwegian Polar Institute is pleased to announce the version 2 of “Quantarctica”, public-domain GIS package for Antarctica. Both the full package and the update-only package from version 1 are downloadable at:
http://www.quantarctica.org/downloads/
if you want to learn Quantarctica in one minute, here is a YouTube video for the version 1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HV_VbxKKDM
Since its first release one year ago, there is a growing community of Quantarctica users. Quantarctica is a package of Antarctic continent-wide datasets optimized for the use on free GIS software QGIS. It currently includes ADD-based maps, continent-wide mosaics and high-resolution satellite imagery, and glaciology/geophysics data; here is a list of data included in the package:
http://www.quantarctica.org/downloads/
We use universal color to help people who have color vision deficiency. End users can modify the package freely; many people use it as the base of their own project GIS package.
The Quantarctica package includes QGIS software for Windows, but QGIS also supports MacOS X, Linux, and Android, and the distributed data package and project file are supposed to work on these platforms as well. We tested only on Windows, but heard from users that it works fine on MacOS X and Linux.
We appreciate all data contributors to Quantarctica. When you use Quantarctica, please look the meta data page (double click the layer, and go to the meta data tab), and appropriately cite the original reference of a specific dataset that you refer. And we are really happy if you mention Quantarctica in your publications/presentations.
For more information, please contact Kenichi Matsuoka.