[Qgis-psc] First QGIS in practice article

Otto Dassau otto.dassau at gmx.de
Wed May 6 05:31:02 PDT 2009 

Hi Tim, 

great and many thanks. You can find the final result here:
http://qgis.org/en/community/qgis-case-studies.html

 Otto

On Wed, 06 May 2009 11:36:45 +0200
Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com> wrote:

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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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