[Qgis-developer] QGIS - French Ministry of Environment

[MORREALE Jean Roc]

Hi, here is a very short resume of a QGIS party that was organized a few
days ago by the French Ministry of Environment (MEEDDM [1]) to exchange
informations on Quantum GIS, in order to determine the possibility of
its use as one of their GIS desktop tools. Most of the participants were
technical members of the ministry and its local branches, and Vincent
Picavet (OSGEO-fr treasurer) and I (OSGEO-fr/QGIS).

QGIS is being used internally for months by some of their agents or
departments in parallel with the actual official tool, which is MapInfo.
The ministry is ongoing a rationalization of their actual software base,
leading to the adoption of web gis and the study of alternative desktop
tools, namely QGIS. This ministry has already switched to OpenOffice and
changed their Access databases to PostGIS.

No decision has been taken yet but the general opinion on QGIS was
positive, the ministry's technical teams have already produced
documentation set for their internal formations and are conducting use
tests with several services. The main point was to determine if QGIS was
able to fulfill 100% of MapInfo's uses and the answer was mixed : no on
some aspects (no "font/annotation" layer type, different proportional
symbols aka #960, etc.) and far more on others (labelv2, symbology, sql,
etc.).

Several tests were also done to determine the effort needed to customize
QGIS, and two tools were developed :
- SelectPlusFr, a plugin based on Barry ROWLINGSON's SelectPlus
extending the selection tools
- OpenWOR, a plugin which allows to partly open .wor file in QGIS (I'll
post more on that later)

A decision on migrating part of the software base is still to be
discussed, but the technical team of the ministry already intends to
contribute code (aforementioned plugins at least) and would like to
provide financial support to QGIS in some way.

Regards,
MORREALE Jean Roc

[1] http://www.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/