[Qgis-user] Re: Brochure from FIG/FAO: FLOSS in Cadastre and Land Registration - Opportunities and Risk

[gertrude.pieper at online.com.kh]

Hi Andreas,

Quoting Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net>:
> Thank you for pointing us to the existing efforts of Stefan, you and
> others for Desktop GIS comparisons. I think we (the QGIS community) can
> certainly help to update the QGIS column in your comparison chart
> (http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Albk_XRkhVkzdGxyYk8tNEZvLUp1UTUzTFN5bjlLX2c&hl=en) - there is quite a bit of functionality/information missing in this chart. Things that were introduced in QGIS 1.4 and   
> QGIS
> 1.5.

Yes, that is the table I was referring to, already a bit outdated but  
very useful if the info is updated for all the projects. I cc this to  
Cameron Shorter (Cameron do you know if there have been any new  
developments on the desktop GIS comparison issue?)

> The question is how we deal with functionality that is only available
> through Plugins? Should it be mentioned that the functionality is
> available through plugin (a footnote?)

I guess this is something that the participating projects would have  
to agree on, I would say that it is perfectly OK to add functionality  
to the table that is only available through plugins. In my view, a  
comparison table should answer questions such as "We need to do this  
and that in our project, can we do it with QGIS or do we need gvSIG?"  
and in that sense, all the functionality that is publicly available  
(and tested with the current version) could be included. On the other  
hand, I suppose only stable software releases should be included,  
since the stable versions are the ones that are used in production  
environments.

> One interesting new development with QGIS is to use existing resources
> also for web services. The start is the QGIS Mapserver (or QGIS
> server), which can use an existing desktop project and deploy it as WMS
> for the web. Together with OpenLayers/Ext/GeoExt one can do quite
> powerful webmapping systems, in a relative short time. Later,
> additional OGC services may follow, such as WFS server or others.

Support for WMS, WFS and other OGC services are definitely interesting  
features to follow up and compare between projects!

> For the record: QGIS did not start as a GRASS viewer, but as a Postgis
> viewer (by Gary Sherman). I believe GRASS editing was added much later.

Thanks for pointing this out!

Best regards, Gertrude