[Qgis-community-team] New Windows XP 1.0.2 user, interested in helping with documentation

[Andrew Chapman]

I'm new to QGIS and GIS in general but come from a background managing and
developing a variety of hardware and software products.

My particular reason for trying QGIS is that I need to map and correlate
information with a specific emphasis on flooding and drainage in rural
communities. I'm evaluating QGIS in the hope that this can become the basis
for information exchange between local communities and government bodies.
The starting data would be from the UK's Ordnance Survey MasterMap GML
(distributed as GZ) files.

To stand any chance of take-up the user must have an easy introduction. or
they will just give up. Having developed so many products over the years, I
know how hard it is to write guides that cope with the lowest common
denominator while not being insulting. 

I'm currently still quite close to that 'lowest common denominator' but am
willing to have a go at writing an introduction from the perspective of a
UK, Windows and Ordinance Survey data user. While I appreciate that I
probably will have several areas where my limited experience needs
correcting, I'm at the stage of being able to load MasterMap files and
display (at least some of) the data. I have also had a large number of
dead-ends and confusion during this learning process that it would be nice
to stop others having to go through.

So:

1.	Would this be of interest?
2.	Has anyone else being looking at using MasterMap including importing
symbols (I've now integrated the point ones) and use of GML files?
3.	While it is very nice to hear about what QGIS can do, what seems to
be missing is often a clear explanation of what it cannot do. As an example,
I loaded the new GML layer which, from an examination of the XML data,
contains both polygons and polylines, but only the polygons get displayed
or converted to shape layers - this may be a problem of an ignorant user or,
a limitation of the current implementation.
4.	How does a non-Linux user contribute?

Regards,

 

Andrew Chapman

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