[Qgis-developer] QGIS - French Ministry of Environment

[Andreas Neumann]

  Hi Jean,

Thank you for this interesting information. I understand that the 
decision is still pending but that there is a positive attitude towards 
QGIS.

As far as labeling/annotation features, there had been recent 
improvements in the trunk. And there will be more. This work is funded 
from the cities of Uster and Thun in Switzerland. The recent 
improvements are around data-defined text properties (font-family, size, 
color, rotation, offsets (vertical and horizontal), etc) - basically 
porting the old data-defined settings to the new label engine.

Marco will also soon start work on manual label placement with the 
option of having different anchor points (aligned with the Swiss 
Interlis text placement). This would potentially also be useful for MEEDDM.

Are you aware that annotations also exist in newer QGIS versions? This 
was funded by the Kanton of Solothurn. I don't know if the current 
annotations satisfy your needs, but it is worth exploring. The 
annotations as they are implemented currently are stored in the project 
file, not in a separate layer. You probably want the annotation layer 
type - but I think that this will be covered by the work mentioned in 
the paragraph above. Please let us know your requirements regarding 
labeling/annotation - Marco is currently working on them, and maybe your 
requirements could be taken care of at the same time.

The Swiss QGIS users are coordinating QGIS development and sharing the 
funding efforts as well. We collaborate with the companies Sourcepole 
(Marco Hugentobler, Pirmin Kalberer) and Norbit (Jürgen Fischer). If you 
are interested, we can also do more international 
collaboration/coordination. Of course a lot of issues could be discussed 
on the mailinglists, but there could be meetings as well, maybe also at 
an upcoming Hackfest, or separate.

In my opinion, new features can be included quite fast into QGIS, if 
funding/financing can be organized. Often faster than with commercial 
software. Some coordination should be done to avoid double or triple 
efforts (same feature developed several times by different parties) and 
to maximize the benefits from the financial contributions.

Please keep us informed about the upcoming decision/plans of MEEDDM.

Andreas

On 9/26/10 2:27 PM, MORREALE Jean Roc wrote:
> 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/
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