[Qgis-psc] First QGIS in practice article

Tim Sutton tim at linfiniti.com
Wed May 6 02:36:45 PDT 2009 

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Hi

Otto Dassau wrote:
> Hi, 
> 
> Horst Düster sent a first article for our "QGIS success stories". I would like
> to announce it the next days and encourage more companies/institutions, but it
> would be nice if you have a look first. It would be nice if you can revise a
> little, especially to fix language mistakes.
> 
> http://qgis.org/en/community/qgis-in-practice.html
> 
> I can provide you a joomla account for that if you need.
> 
> Furthermore I am not sure if "QGIS in practice" sounds good. I didn' take "QGIS
> success stories" because I would like to stay more "grounded" :) - maybe you
> have a better idea.
> 


I think "QGIS Case Studies" could work too or "QGIS User Stories".



> Later I will put the articles in a more prominent place, but we have some
> problems with the joomla installation (probably because of the old php4) and
> need to find a solution for that first.


I'm having a slow internet day (trying to upload a qgis installer kills
all other things I try to do) so I'm providing my corrections below if
you wouldnt mind to paste them into the article?

- -----------

In the year 2001 the State Parliament of the Canton of Solothurn decided
to migrate from Windows to Linux. The motivations were to be independent
from one particular vendor, to encourage free enterprise and reduce
license costs. As a result SO!GIS department of the Canton of Solothurn
started to deliver the GIS-requirements of more than 3500 employees with
a FOSSGIS strategy.

The first step we took was the introduction of UMN MapServer and the
creation of a SO!MAP client that offers an easy to use WebGIS client for
all the 3500 employees. The second step was the migration of all our
geospatial data from Shapefiles to the PostGIS spatial database engine.
The introduction was very successful, but an easy to use desktop GIS was
lacking.

After an evaluation of different Desktop GIS we decided to use QGIS in
conjunction with GRASS, replacing ESRI ArcInfo and ArcView3 in the 2006.
The decision was driven by the following aspects:

   1. Due to our of desktop GIS in a Linux Terminal Server environment,
Java wasn't an option.
   2. OSGeo Project-Organisation
   3. GUI translated in German language
   4. Documentation written in German language
   5. An Active developer (Marco Hugentobler) near Solothurn in Switzerland.
   6. We could contract Marco Hugentobler to implement missing / lacking
features like Digitizing and Mapcomposing.
   7. Application and Plugin developement with Python
   8. Growing user community
   9. Very active developer community
  10. Independence from a single operating system


Where do we use QGIS

In contrast to the interactive maps served by UMN MapServer, the desktop
GIS has to offer a flexible view at the geospatial data of Solothurn.
QGIS Desktop GIS is in use by more than 50 users for their daily work.
But many of them are not GIS experts. They want to visualize and/or
capture geospatial data with an intuitive user interface.

One of the most important Desktop GIS issues is the question: "How do I
get the information from the PostGIS geodata repository I need?". Since
 our end users are unfamiliar with data models and the underlying
structures of our spatial database, offering the users a raw connection
to the PostGIS DB was not an option. We have a metadata database that
stores the descriptions of all production data called 'SO!DATA'. SO!DATA
 contains an inventory of the data models in a human readable and the
non-GIS-Expert user is able to use this database to discover the
information they need.

	 	SO!GIS Layer Plugin
Figure 1: 'SO!GIS Layer' plugin developed at the Canton of Solothurn


To remove the need for end users to interact directly with PostGIS
connections and table selection dialogs, a plugin has been developed in
python. The plugin is called "SO!GIS Layer" (see Figure 1). The plugin
connects to the SO!GIS PostGIS repository, gets the information of all
published geospatial data layers from SO!DATA and offers the user a GUI
to find the data layers they need. With this infrastructure in place,
our users are happy - they can prepare for geoprocessing, editing and
map composing in an individual way.


SO!GIS Search Plugin
Figure 2: 'SO!GIS Suche' plugin developed at the Canton of Solothurn
	
Another required QGIS plugin we created is called 'SO!GIS Suche'. This
provides the possibility to search for locations like townships,
addresses or cadastral parcels (see Figure 2). As a result the user is
able to navigate very easily to an area of interest.

At the moment many other plugins are under development. These will
support data manipulation, analysis or mapping for different projects.
Our in-development plugins cover topics  such as nature reserves, soil
conservation, cadastral data verification, crisis management, abandoned
sites and so on.

Conclusion

Today we can say that using QGIS was the right decision for us. QGIS
offers most of the features requested by our users. The Canton of
Solothurn subcontracts the creation of features that QGIS lacks to
commercial support providers. With PyQgis and PyQt there are excellent
options for easy in-house application development based on QGIS. One
huge benefit is the unlimited number of installations. Everyone who
needs to use QGIS can use it without any limitations. To push the
development of QGIS the Canton of Solothurn has invested approximately
$30,000 into QGIS every year since 2007. This is much more efficient and
target-oriented than the payment of support into the black box of our
former software provider.

This article was contributed in May 2009 by Dr. Horst Düster. He is GIS
coordinator at the Department of Geoinformation in the Canton of
Solothurn, Switzerland.


- ----------------


I think we should add a paragraph at the start with the following info:

- - A little map showing where Solothurn is in relation to the world and
to Switzerland.
- - A line saying the size of the population that the canton serves e.g.
The canton provides services and infrastructure to 4 billion Swiz citizens.
- - It might be nice to provide a little mugshot of Horst at the start of
the article to keep it 'human'.


Great article!

Regards

Tim








>  
> regards,
>  Otto
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-psc mailing list
> Qgis-psc at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-psc
> 


- --
Tim Sutton, Linfiniti Consulting
==============================================
* QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
* Visit http://linfiniti.com for more information
  about the QGIS and FOSS services we provide.
* Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
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