[Qgis-user] Local Government for QGIS

Fri Jun 26 08:03:02 PDT 2015

Hi Chris
In my experience use of GIS is intermittent within Local Authorities (I worked at one until last year). Going completely FOSS is difficult because, at least for county councils and their metropolitan equivalents, every department has different needs, and there are often lots of legacy proprietary systems.
Off the top of my head there were three departments that had extensions to standard GIS/CAD that they were reliant on:

-       Rights of Way – Proprietary ArcGIS 9.x(!) addon

-       Archaeology - Proprietary MapInfo extension

-       Road Safety – Proprietary AutoCAD extension

There’s also the question – at what point does something start being a GIS? Many fields have their own special needs and only include GIS tangentially. For example all the below had some GIS-like feature in their bespoke, domain-specific software, but it was an after-thought rather than the main feature:

-       Highways – custom GIS (reliant on ArcSDE 9.x!)

-       Buses – Integrated GIS in specialist application

-       School admissions – Integrated GIS in specialist application

-       Forestry – Custom GIS/application (couldn’t handle multipart polygons)

-       Bridges – Some WMS integrated in a specialist application.

So in a reasonably sized county council, that’s at least 8 different GIS systems that are bespoke. I’d initiated a move towards QGIS before leaving (hopefully they’ve kept it up), but QGIS simply isn’t suited to most of those tasks.

Web-GIS is slightly different because while there are a few that have developed their own (http://maps.warwickshire.gov.uk is one, OpenLayers based front-end, GeoServer, but Oracle behind the scenes (it’s what we had), there are definitely others but I forget who), generally speaking for most authorities it’s cheaper/easier to go with a hosted or pre-developed solution. That said, quite a few are now based on Open Source. Astun certainly has it all the way down the stack (including PostGIS) for instance.

Short version: Going 100% OS GIS is difficult.

Cheers,
Jonathan

From: qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Chris Buckmaster
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2015 10:52 AM
To: qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] Local Government for QGIS

Hi All

Interesting discussion – I am responsible for GIS at a small local authority in the UK; we are an ESRI site but I have seen just how far FOSS4G has come in the last couple of years and have now had a proposal accepted to look at migrating our ESRI infrastructure over to PostGIS / QGIS / OpenLayers over the next year. I’ve been impressed at how efficient FOSS is, and particularly for us where we don’t deal with advanced analytics etc, for the tools we need FOSS can provide these just as well, if not better in some cases than proprietary offerings.

Does anyone know of any local gov authorities that have gone completely FOSS? i.e. built their own web app(s) and are using open source desktop and database software?

Chris

From: qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> [mailto:qgis-user-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Neumann
Sent: 15 June 2015 10:39
To: Micha Silver; qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] Local Government for QGIS

Hi Micha,

Thanks again for your response. I will discuss this with the devs and will probably come up with a proposal, asking for some organizations to join the funding.

Andreas
On 15.06.2015 10:28, Micha Silver wrote:
Hi Andreas:

Thanks for your response.
I'm quite sure that for most regional councils here, DXF would not be enough. The surveyors and planners that we work with all use Autodesk products. All their work is delivered in dwg, and some do not even know that there is such a thing as DXF.

I have not been following the Open Design Alliance lately, but including that library QGIS would certainly be a quantum leap forward. After Radim's success in crowd funding the implementation of GRASS 7, your suggestion indeed sounds feasible.

Regards,
Micha

On 6/15/2015 10:28 AM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
Hi Micha,

That is interesting - we invested a lot in the DXF export capabilities of QGIS. Once this is finished I am pretty sure we will also look to improve the situation regarding the import.

Do you think import of DXF is enough or do we also need DWG support? If so, the best bet would probably be the Teigha library from the Open Design Alliance (https://www.opendesign.com/the_oda_platform/Teigha), which isn't available for free - but it is the library most other GIS (eg. ESRI, Intergraph) and CAD (eg. Bentley, Bricscad, etc.) are using. We would have to pay a membership fee, but it allows us to redistribute the library with the software. Membership in the consortium is affordable in my opinion.

What are your thoughts on this? Would you also be available to help with a crowd-funding effort? Do you see options besides Teigha?

Andreas
On 15.06.2015 08:57, Micha Silver wrote:

On 06/15/2015 09:23 AM, Bernhard Ströbl wrote:
Hi Joseph,

could you elaborate why "it would be unrealistic to say we
could ever be a 100% QGIS"? I am curious because I lost contact with ESRI products a couple years ago.

From our point of view, we need support for dwg. That side of vendor lock-in is, unfortunately, even stronger that the ties to ESRI. So we stay with Arc* not because of the GIS capabilites, but more or less only because of the ability to read Autocad plans and surveys.

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