Basic GIS Mapping product recommendations -- freeware for a beginner, not looking to become an expert

Question

I working on a history of then Pacific Northwest. My goal is to display dynamic time series maps of the creation/presence/growth of various towns, their population size, railroad line tracks laid, church foundings, industries' arrival, timber logged, etc.

My data set will be simple SQLite tables with fields like:

• Location - County or Town (obviously some relational tie to geo coordinates and boundaries)
• Year
• Category (population, church, RR arrival, etc.)
• Quantity (for those categories where this applies, eg. population, or lumber produced)

I want to generate clean, simple maps with WA, OR, ID road or terrain backgrounds and whatever data set and symbols I select for any point in time.

My skills are limited. I'm not looking to be GIS specialist. I'm an advanced beginner in Python/Pandas and R. My preference is MAC but I can use Wintel-only too.

I welcome suggestions comparatively easy to adopt and use for the above modest goals FREEWARE.

Answer 1

QGIS is the default go-to Open Source and free GIS application.

It runs on all major desktop operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, along with third party companion apps for mobile operating systems.

Answer 2

Since you already have some familiarity with Python you might also want to take a look at Folium which adds Python/Jupyter and add leaflet.js library for visualisations.

An example (from the site):

import folium
import pandas as pd

url = (
    "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/python-visualization/folium/master/examples/data"
)
state_geo = f"{url}/us-states.json"
state_unemployment = f"{url}/US_Unemployment_Oct2012.csv"
state_data = pd.read_csv(state_unemployment)

m = folium.Map(location=[48, -102], zoom_start=3)

folium.Choropleth(
    geo_data=state_geo,
    name="choropleth",
    data=state_data,
    columns=["State", "Unemployment"],
    key_on="feature.id",
    fill_color="YlGn",
    fill_opacity=0.7,
    line_opacity=0.2,
    legend_name="Unemployment Rate (%)",
).add_to(m)

folium.LayerControl().add_to(m)

m