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

[Otto Dassau]

Hi Andrew,

On Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:27:08 +0100
"Andrew Chapman" <andrew.chapman at donkagen.co.uk> wrote:

> 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?

yes - it sounds interesting. I forward this mail to the user list as well. The
community-team list is the place where people who want to contribute organize
their work (so you were right), but there are more people on the user list to
discuss your idea in general.

> 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.

I am not sure, but this is possible in version 1.1, I think. But I don't have a
mixed GML layer to test. Maybe someone else can say more?

> 4.	How does a non-Linux user contribute?

We don't make a difference between OS. Anybody is welcome to contribute. At the
moment there are more linux users, I guess, that's why you might think that
there is a problem to contribute as Windows or Mac user - but it is not!

We just started a little discussion on this list some days ago, that we need to
be more user oriented and friendly. We were thinking about putting the Wiki
Users Corner on the front page and motivating more users to add their
experiences, material, howtos, .... So you could add an "introduction for
Windows and Ordinance Survey data user" to the wiki. Just an idea, of course.  
Let's see what others say.

Regards,
 Otto