[Qgis-user] Enquiries

[Nicolas Cadieux]

Hi,
I agree with Régis on this one (including 42).  Each question is a mini PhD thesis.  You might get more responses if you write your needs instead and ask if QGIS can help. I still will give you a few very short answers.

> Le 11 mars 2020 à 04:40, Llywelyn Law <llywelyn.law at googlemail.com> a écrit :
> 
> Hello all. Just a few questions on the software, would appreciate any feedback.
> 
> 1. Benefits of it use to site engineers, land surveyors etc.
> 
> 2. What data/information can be produced and exported.

If you don’t have a GIS installed, then the benefits are clear.  Search for what a GIS does and QGIS pretty much does it or can be  programmed to do it with Python.  You can also asked for stuff to be added by developers and contribute financially or otherwise to develop these projects.  The user and developer lists are very good and full of people ready to help.  QGIS is generally confortable working with vector, mesh and raster data.  You can also do some basic remote sensing stuff. You can work with LiDAR data but it is not optimized to work with point clouds.  I use QGIS and CloudCompare, Meshlab, PDAL and Lastools (the OpenSource tools) for this.

> 
> 3. What plug-ins have been developed and that are very useful.

Visite the QGIS plugin page.  Plugins can be installed by the user after the installation of QGIS. This really depends on your needs. If you are into remote sensing, then a plugin like semi-automatic classification makes sense.  https://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/popular/

> 
> 4. Data export formats

QGIS uses the GDAL library to do many of the read and write operations.  Since both projects are OpenSource, the goal is to open the software by using as many formats as possible. https://gdal.orgindex.html/. Some proprietary software will lock people in by using data formats that can only be read by there software. This is not the QGIS approche. Data formats in QGIS are open.  The QGIS Project format (a file useful for opening groups of data files and making things like print layouts) is also Open but not currently read, to my knowledge, by other software. This is generally the case with most project files or workspace files in GIS. 

> 
> 5. Comparison to ArcGIS.

I cannot not go into a detailed description of differences.  Both are competent GIS capable of working with raster and vector data.  I have been working with QGIS for over 10 years for research and work and feel no need to invest time or money in ArcGIS.  Most of my time devoted to Arc is dedicated to trouble shooting the software for Arc users. Therefor, what you learn on QGIS is applicable to Arc and vice versa.  GIS after all, is a science and a method, not a software.  Some stuff is easier and faster to do with Arc and some stuff easier and faster to do with QGIS.  I think statistical modelling with conditional loops are something ESRI does well but I don’t make use of that.  I would most likely go with R for something like this.  I don’t need to point out the obvious that QGIS is free and OpenSource.

> 
> Thank you very much.
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
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Cheers
Nicolas
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