My latest book “QGIS Map Design”, co-authored with well-known cartography expert Gretchen Peterson and with a foreword by the founder of QGIS, Gary Sherman himself, is now available as e-book.

In three parts, the book covers layer styling, labeling, and designing print maps. All recipes come with data and project files so you can reproduce the maps yourself.

Check the book website for the table of contents and a sample chapter.

Just in time for the big QGIS 2.14 LTR release, the paperback will be available March 1st.

On a related note, I am also currently reviewing the latest proofs of the 3rd edition of “Learning QGIS”, which will be updated to QGIS 2.14 as well.

Happy QGISing!

So some good news for QGIS users who also need/want to use MapInfo.  QGIS via GDAL 2.0 can support MapInfo TAB file editing. In all older versions of GDAL there was only support for read and/or write but not both.

MapInfo TAB editing has been supported in GDAL 2 but up until this point QGIS has only be built against GDAL 1.xx.  GDAL 2.x is now the default GDAL release in OSGeo4w.

From Jurgen:

2.0.2 is now the default GDAL in OSGeo4W and the nightlies (qgis-ltr-dev,
qgis-rel-dev and qgis-dev) already picked it up.

With the next release the regular packages (2.14 and 2.8) will also be updated
to use it

Even if you don’t want to make the switch to full QGIS you can now use both bits of software and edit in both.

QGIS will still only support a single geometry type per layer so if you open a mixed tab file you will get the geometry type selector.  You can load the layer 3 times if you need the 3 different geometry types.

Following the popularity of the AutoTrace plugin, we received a number of requests for additional features and to incorporate the tool into the main Advanced Digitising tools in QGIS.

Funding for the work was generously raised with the help of the community in 2015 and the feature landed in QGIS 2.14

How to use Trace Digitising

Check out the Trace Digitising in QGIS for detailed instructions on how to use the tool.

Key features

The trace tool:

• uses Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm to find traceable routes
• can trace routes over multiple distinct features
• can be used with Advanced Digitising tools (e.g. reshaping)
• can be enabled and disabled by pressing T on your keyboard while digitising
• is fast and easy to use

The following video demonstrates how to use the tracing tool:

This video shows how you can make use of tracing while reshaping a polygon:

Sponsors

The project was kindly sponsored by the QGIS community. Special thanks to all those who contributed towards the development of this tool:

• The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead
• Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council
• Ujaval Gandhi
• Surrey Heath Borough Council
• Matias Arnold
• Northumberland National Park Authority
• Buccleuch Estates Limited
• Countryscape

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Mergin Maps, a field data collection app based on QGIS. Mergin Maps makes field work easy with its simple interface and cloud-based sync. Available on Android, iOS and Windows.

The Call for Papers and Workshops for the 2nd International QGIS User and Developer Conference, is still open!

Call for Presentations
Deadline: February 22nd

The QGIS Conference presentations are 20 minutes long, with time for Q&A at the end of each talk. Presentations may cover any aspect related with the use or development of QGIS software. Anyone can can submit a presentation proposal and take part in the conference as a presenter. The received proposals will be reviewed by the program committee.

See already submitted presentations and details: http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/en/international-qgis-user-and-developer-conference/conferencia-qgis/

Call for Workshops
Deadline: February 22nd

There are two kinds of workshops depending on the duration: 2 hours or 4 hours. If you want to actively participate in the 2nd Int. QGIS Conference and impart a workshop, don’t hesitate to send your workshop proposal to [email protected]

The proposal should be a brief abstract pointing out the expected duration of the workshop (2 hours, 4 hours) as well as a few lines describing the content of the workshop, pre-requisites for the attendants (if needed), name of the instructor…

The instructors of the selected workshops will receive a free pass for the conference.

See already submitted workshops and details: http://www.sigte.udg.edu/jornadassiglibre/en/international-qgis-user-and-developer-conference/workshops-qgis/

For further details, please send an email at [email protected]

The upcoming 2.14 release of QGIS features a new renderer. For the first time in QGIS history, it will be possible to render 2.5D objects directly in the map window. This feature is the result of a successful crowd funding campaign organized by Matthias Kuhn last year.

In this post, I’ll showcase this new renderer and compare the achievable results to output from the Qgis2threejs plugin.

For this post, I’m using building parts data from the city of Vienna, which is publicly available through their data viewer:

Download using the geodata viewer of the city of Vienna

This dataset is a pretty detailed building model, where each building is made up of multiple features that represent parts of the building with different height. Of course, if we just load the dataset in default style, we cannot really appreciate the data:

Loaded building parts layer

All this changes if we use the new 2.5D renderer. With just a few basic settings, we can create 2.5D representations of the building parts:

QGIS 2.5D renderer settings

Compare the results to aerial images in Google Maps …

QGIS 2.5D renderer and view in Google Maps

… not bad at all!

Except for a few glitches concerning the small towers at the corners of the building, and some situations where it seems like the wrong building part is drawn in the front, the 2.5D look is quite impressive.

Now, how does this compare to Qgis2threejs, one of the popular plugins which uses web technologies to render 3D content?

One obvious disadvantage of Qgis2threejs is that we cannot define a dedicated roof color. Thus the whole block is drawn in the same color.

On the other hand, Qgis2threejs does not suffer from the rendering order issues that we observe in the QGIS 2.5D renderer and the small towers in the building corners are correctly displayed as well:

QGIS 2.5D renderer and Qgis2threejs output

Overall, the 2.5D renderer is a really fun and exciting new feature. Besides the obvious building usecase, I’m sure we will see a lot of thematic maps making use of this as well.

Give it a try!

In the next post, I’m planning a more in-depth look into how the 2.5D renderer works. Here’s a small teaser of what’s possible if you are not afraid to get your hands dirty:

Ok so quick spoiler here: there is no QGIS 3.0 ready yet, nor will there be a QGIS 3.0 for some time. This article provides a bit more detail on the plans for QGIS 3.0. A few weeks ago I wrote about some of the considerations for the 3.0 release, so you may want to read that first before continuing with this article as I do not cover the same ground here.

A lot of consideration has gone into deciding what the approach will be for the development of QGIS 3.0. Unfortunately the first PSC vote regarding which proposal to follow was a split decision (4 for, 3 against, 1 abstention and 1 suggestion for an alternative in the discussion). During our PSC meeting this week we re-tabled the topic and eventually agreed on Jürgen Fischer’s proposal (Jürgen is a QGIS PSC Member and the QGIS Release Manager) by a much more unanimous margin of 8 for, 1 neutral and 1 absent. Jürgen’s proposal is largely similar to the Proposal 2 described in my previous posting. I want to make some special notes here about our discussion and subsequent decision which will hopefully help to clarify the thinking behind our decision for other interested observers.  First let me lay out Jürgen’s plan in his own words:

“My preferred approach would still be:

• Do a Qt5/PyQt5/Python3 branch in parallel, actually work on it until it’s ready, make it master and release it as 3.0
• Meantime keep working on master (2.x) and keep releasing them every 4 months as usual

Everyone can work on the branch (s)he wants (or is hired to), but needs to consider if (s)he want to do it (or spend funds on):

• only for 2.x: knowing that it will be released soon; but might become unusable because platforms drop support for stuff it depends on sooner or later
• only for 3.x: not knowing when that will ever release or
• for both: knowing that work needs to be done twice.
• People adding features to the master branch will be responsible to ensure that their work gets merged to 3.0 branch.

As PSC we should maintain the environment for people to do something for QGIS – but we cannot tell them to – so we don’t have resources we can actually plan with and that means we can either release something when the big thing is ready or what we have in fixed intervals.” – Jürgen Fischer

What follows are some further details and clarifications to our preferred approach:

Why do parallel development?

Parallel development of 3.0 maintaining our master branch with 2.x code in it has advantages and disadvantages. First the advantages:

• If we encounter major technical difficulties / release blockers in the 3.0 branch, it will not impact on our normal 3 monthly release cycle.
• Our binary build systems (Linux, Windows and OSX binaries) will be unaffected until 3.0 is ready.
• It is very likely that building 3.0 binaries on different platforms is going to have difficulties for each platform. For example OSGEO4W has no Python3 and Qt5 packages yet. Someone needs to see to the creation of the required package as a separate exercise from the actuals development of a version of QGIS that will take advantage of these updated libraries. We don’t yet know what problems may be in countered in preparing these.
• “Don’t break what already works”: we have a working and relatively stable master branch and we don’t want to do a ‘cowboy stunt’ and break it. We prefer to wait until the 3.0 branch is mature, has passing tests and is known to work well before merging it into master and treating it as our ‘best we currently have’ master branch.

Of course nothing in life is completely easy, there are also some disadvantages:

• Some developers may feel that running two mainstream branches is dilution of effort. To counter this, our public recommendation is that after 2.16 comes out, all QGIS contributors are strongly encouraged to provide their patches against the 3.0 branch. Any features applied to the master branch is not guaranteed to be part of the 3.0 release.
• Regular merging of master to the 3.0 branch may prove more and more difficult over time as the two branches diverge more. Again we will strongly encourage that developers submitting new features after the 2.16 release do so against the 3.0 branch.
• 3.0 branch won’t have auto build system for nightly binaries in the beginning. Since we expect that the initial branch of 3.0 will break these anyway, Having a separate branch is actually an advantage here as it will give binary packages some time to get their build systems up to speed.

To clarify things for developers wondering where to commit their work: we discourage people from writing new features in master after 2.16 is released and rather ask them to make their changes in the 3.0 branch. Only those who really need to see their features in the next 2.18 release would have to dual commit.

Isn’t it better to work on 3.0 in the master branch?

Some queries have been raised about whether it would be better to rather work on 3.0 in the ‘master branch’ and relegate the 2.x code base to a side branch (instead of our intended approach which is to keep master tracking 2.x until 3.0 is ready and then merge it to master). We feel that keeping master tracking the 2.x code base is more conservative – it will not break existing packaging / build systems and if there is any major hitch in 3.0 development the release process will continue unabated based on the 2.x code set. While 3.0 is under development, package builders will have time to figure out the packaging process while still keeping the regular nightly builds against 2.x running. The implication of this is that 2.18 may contain only bug fixes which were applied to the 2.x branch and no significant new features.

The schedule will not be fixed

One thing that we want to make really clear (and was a key point in our many discussions) is that there will be no fixed release date for QGIS version 3.0. There are several reasons for this:

• As a steering committee, we can only set the QGIS ship pointing in a given direction, our power to actually make work happen is extremely limited. This is because we are a community made up largely of volunteer developers or developers working on a commission basis for third party clients. We have no say in how these contributors spend their time.
• We do not yet know which (if any) major technical issues will be encountered during the development of 3.0. Any such issues could very well delay the roll out of QGIS 3.0.

Instead our plan is to make the 2.16 release and then effectively move all developer effort to the 3.0 branch as best we can (through close liaison with our developer community).

To clarify things for those wondering when they will give 3.0 to their users: The actual release date for 3.0 its interterminate, but the general aim is still to try to encourage everyone to get it ready for 1 year from now. Remember that as an open source community we cannot directly ensure that project timelines are met since our developer force is largely volunteer based or work according to their own companies agendas.

Will 3.0 be a Long Term Release (LTR)?

It is our recommendation that we wait until 3.2 is ready before designating it an LTR – there are going to be large changes in the code base for 3.0 and we would rather stabilise things a bit before applying the LTR label to the release.

Looking forward to 3.0

Personally I am very much looking forward to the release of QGIS 3.0 – it represents another huge milestone in our project, it affords us a great opportunity to get rid of a lot of cruft out of our code base and API’s and it will arm us with a set of modern, new libraries that will see us through the next several years. Rock on QGIS 3.0!

QGIS PSC Chairman

So here is an idea.  Say you have a point layer that has a link to a static image from a web cam. Lets say it is a traffic camera for this use case.

We can use that feed to see the image in a browser. Cool. But what would be even cooler is if we could get the images into QGIS as markers without having to download each image each time for a update ourselves.

Turns out it’s pretty easy – could be easier no doubt but lets just go with this route for now.  For this you will need: a custom expression function, and data defined SVG path locations. (We have to use SVG markers because QGIS doesn’t have image markers just yet)

Lets write that custom expression function.  We need a SVG marker so lets set that for the layer and also edit the data defined path

Hit the New file button and define a new function called show_camera. 

import requests
import base64

@qgsfunction(args='auto', group='Custom')
def show_camera(feed, feature, parent):
    svg = """
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<svg>
  <g>
    <image xlink:href="data:image/jpeg;base64,{0}" height="256" width="320" />
  </g>
</svg>
"""
    data = requests.get(feed, stream=True).content
    name = feed[-16:]
    b64response = base64.b64encode(data)
    newsvg = svg.format(b64response).replace('\n','')
    path = r"C:\temp\camera\{0}.svg".format(name)
    with open(path, 'w') as f:
        f.write(newsvg)
    return path.replace("\\", "/")

This will take the image feed, load it with the Python request library, base64 the image, stick the data in to a SVG, save the SVG to disk, and return the path to the new SVG.

We have to save to disk because QGIS can’t load SVGS from strings, although that would be a cool feature. I am also using base64 because a linked file SVG didn’t render in QGIS.

Once we have defined that we can use the function like so

show_camera( "url" )

looking at the output preview we have

'C:/temp/camera/MRMETRO-1216.jpg.svg'

Which looks right. Hit OK on the expression.

Before hitting Apply just make the size of the marker a little bigger as it will make the image to small to see, I used 35 for the demo. You should also pick a SVG marker from the list that is used as the default one if there is no valid path returned.

Hit Apply. Magic :)

The images are getting download and saved into C:\temp\camera for this demo but you could add some more magic around that.

Something to note is that each time you refresh the map you are making a bunch of web requests to get the new images. You could avoid this by tracking the image times and only grabbing new ones if a set time has elapsed.  I will leave that up the reader, however here is a link to a Gist with the code if you wish to fork it

Big hat tip to QGIS and its multi threaded rendering that still allows you to continue to work while it renders and downloads the images in the background.

Hi! In this blog I describe how you can create proper parcels with polygon geometry in from polylines (parcel boundaries) and points (Parcel point with parcel attributes placed inside parcel boundaries). Since the 1st of januari 2016 a dataset named, BRK (Basis Registratie Kadaster) is available from PDOK. You can download these in GML format … Continue reading Generate parcels areas from parcel boundaries

(aka Features that ArcGIS Desktop users might not know that exists)

EN | PT

From time to time, I read articles comparing ArcGIS vs QGIS. Since many of those articles are created from an ArcGIS user point of view, they invariably lead to biased observations on QGIS lack of features. It’s time for a QGIS user perspective, so bare with me on this (a bit) long, totally and openly biased post.

“Hello, my name is Alexandre, and I have been using… QGIS“

This is something I would say at an anonymous QGIS user therapy group. I’m willing to attend one of those because being recently and temporally forced to use ArcGIS Desktop again (don’t ask!), I really really really miss QGIS in many ways.

There was a time when I have used ArcGIS on the regular basis. I used it until version 9.3.1 and then decided to move away (toward the light) into QGIS (1.7.4 I think). At that time, I missed some (or even many?) ArcGIS features, but I was willing to accept it in exchange for the freedom of the Open Source philosophy. Since then, a lot have happened in the QGIS world, and I have been watching it closely. I would expect the same have happened in ArcGIS side, but, as far I can see, it didn’t.

I’m using top shelf ArcGIS Desktop Advanced and I’m struggling to do very basic tasks that simply are nonexistent in ArcGIS. So here’s my short list of QGIS functionalities that I’m longing for. For those of you that use ArcGIS exclusively, some of this features may catch you by surprise.

Warning: For those of you that use ArcGIS exclusively, some of this features may catch you by surprise.

Transparency control

“ArcGIS have transparency! It’s in the Display tab, in the layer’s properties dialog!”

Yes, but… you can only set transparency at the layer level. That is, either it’s all transparent, or it’s not…

In QGIS on the other end, you can set transparency at layer level, feature/symbol level, and color level. You can say that this is being overrated, but check the differences in the following images.

Notice that in QGIS you can set transparency at color level everywhere (or almost everywhere) there is a color to select. This includes annotations (like the ones in the image above), labels and composers items. You can even set transparency in colors by using the RGBA function in an expression! How sweet can that be?

Blending modes

This is one of QGIS’s pristine jewels. The ability to combine layers the way you would do in almost any design/photo editing software. At layer or at feature level, you can control how they will “interact” with other layers or features below. Besides the normal mode, QGIS offers 12 other blending modes:  Lighten, Screen, Dodge, Darken, Multiply, Burn, Overlay, Soft light, Hard light, Difference, and Subtract. Check this page to know more about the math behind each one and this image for some examples

It’s not easy to grasp how can this be of any use for cartography before you try it yourself. I had the chance to play around while trying to answer this question.

A very common application for this functionality is when you want to add shadows to simulate the relief by putting a hill shade on top of other layers. In ArcGIS, you can only control the layer transparency, and the result is always a bit pale. But in QGIS, you can keep the strength of the original colors by using the multiply mode in the hill shade layer.

You can also use blending modes in the print composer items, allowing you to combine them with other items and textures. This gives you the opportunity to make more “artistic” things without the need to go post-processing in a design software.

Colour Picker Menu

Controlling color is a very important deal for a cartographer and QGIS allow you to control it like the professional you are. You can select your colours using many different interfaces. Interfaces that you might recognize from software like Inkscape, Photoshop, Gimp and others alike.

My favorite one is the color picker. Using color picker, you can pick colors from anywhere on your screen, either from QGIS itself or outside. This is quite handy and productive when you are trying to use a color from your map, it’s legend, a COLOURlovers palette or a company logo.

You can also copy/paste colors between dialogs, save and import color palettes, and you can even name a color and use it in a variable. With all this available for free, it’s hard to swallow Windows color selector :(.

Vector symbols renderers “powertools”

In ArcGIS, you have a few fancy ways to symbol your vector layers. You got: Single symbol, Unique values, Unique values many fields… and so on. At the first glance, you may think that QGIS lacks some of them. Believe me, it doesn’t! In fact, QGIS offers much more flexibility when you need to symbol your layers.

For starters, it allows you to use fields or expressions on any of the symbols renderers, while ArcGIS only allows the use of fields. Powered by hundreds of functions and the ability to create your owns in python, what you can do with the expression builder has no limits. This means, for instance, that you can combine, select, recalculate, normalize an infinite number of fields to create your own “values” (not to mention that you can tweak your values labels, making it ideal to create the legend).

And then, in QGIS, you have the special (and kinda very specific) renderers, that make you say “wooooh”. Like the Inverted polygons that allow you to fill the the outside of polygons (nice to mask other features), the Point displacement to show points that are too close to each others, and the Heatmap that will transform, ON-THE-FLY, all your points in a layer into a nice heatmap without the need to convert them to raster (and that will update as soon as you, or anyone else, edits the point features).

But I have left the best to the end. The “One rendered to Rule them all”, the Rule-based symbols. With the rule-based renderer, you can add several rules, group them in a tree structure, and set each one with a desired symbol. This gives QGIS users full control of their layer’s symbols, and, paired with expression builder and data-defined properties, opens the door to many wonderful applications.

Atlas

One of my favorite (and missed) features in QGIS is the Map Composer’s Atlas. I know that ArcGIS has its own “Atlas”, the Data Driven Pages, but frankly, it’s simply not the same.

I believe you know the basic functionally that both software allow. You create a map layout and choose a vector layer as coverage, and it will create an output panned or zoomed for each of the layer’s feature. You can also add some labels that will change according to the layers attributes.

But in QGIS, things go a little bit further…

Basically, you can use coverage layer’s attributes and geometry anywhere you can use an expression. And, in QGIS, expressions are everywhere. That way, most layers and map composer items properties can be controlled by a single coverage layer.

With the right configuration, while iterating over the atlas coverage features, you can,  choose what feature to show and what features to hide, change a theme color for your map, rotate and resize your page acording to the feature size, choose a specific logo to came along with your map, and much more. Once again, the sky is the limit.

So, if you pair Atlas it with QGIS data-defined properties, rule-based symbols and expressions, ArcGIS Data Driven Pages are no match. You don’t think so? Try to answer this question then.

Tip: If you really want to leverage your map production, using Spatialite or Postgis databases you can create the perfect atlas coverage layers from views that fit your needs. No data redundancy and they are always updated.

Label and Style dialogs

This one is more of a User Experience thing than an actual feature, but you won’t imagine how refreshing it is to have all Style and Labels options in two single dialogs (with several tabs, of course).

Using the symbol menu in ArcGIS makes me feel like if I’m in the Inception movie, at some point in time, I no longer know where the hell am I. For example, to apply a dashed outline in a fill symbol I needed to open 5 different dialogs, and then go back clicking OK, OK, OK, OK …

In QGIS, once in the properties menu, every setting is (almost) one click way. And you just need to press OK (or Apply ) once to see the result!

As an extra, you can copy/paste styles from one layer to another, making styling several layers even faster. And now you say:

“Don’t be silly! In ArcGIS you can import symbols from other layers too.”

Symbols? yes. Labels? No! And if you had lots of work setting your fancy labels, having to do the exact same/similar thing in another layer, it will make you wanna cry… I did.

(I think I will leave the multiple styles per layer vs data frames comparison for another time)

WFS

“Say what?!!”

Yup, that’s it, ArcGIS Desktop lacks support for WFS OGC standard unless you buy an extra extension: The Data Interoperability Extention.

In a GIS world that, more and more, is evolving towards Open Data, Open Standards and OGC Web Services, this reveals a very mercantile approach by ESRI. If I were an ESRI customer, I would feel outraged. <sarcasm>Or maybe not… maybe I would thank the opportunity to yet invest some more money in it’s really advanced features…<\sarcasm>

In QGIS, like everything else, WFS is absolutely free (as in freedom, not free beer). All you need to do is add the WFS server’s URL, and you can add all the layers you want, with the absolute sure that they are as updated as you can get.

Fortunately for ArcGIS users with a low budget, they can easily make a request for a layer using the internet browser :-P.

http://giswebservices.massgis.state.ma.us/geoserver/wfs?request=GetFeature&service=wfs&version=1.0.0&typename=massgis:GISDATA.TOWNS_POLY&outputformat=SHAPE-ZIP

Or they can simply use QGIS to download it. But, in both cases, be aware that the layers won’t update themselves by magic.

Expression builder

I have already mentioned the use of expressions several times, but for those of you that do not know the expression Builder, I though I end my post with one of my all time favourite features in QGIS.

I do not know enough of ArcGIS expression builder to really criticize it. But, AFAIK, you can use it to create labels and to populate a field using the field calculator. I know that there are many functions that you can use (I have used just a few) but they are not visible to the common user (you probably need to consult the ArcGIS Desktop Help to know them all). And you can create your own functions in VBScript, Python, and JsScript.

On QGIS side, like I said before, the Expression Builder can be used almost everywhere, and this makes it very convenient for many different purposes. In terms of functions, you have hundreds of functions right there in the builder’s dialog, with the corresponding syntax help, and some examples. You also have the fields and values like in ArcGIS, and you even have a “recent expressions” group for re-using recent expressions with no the need to remember prior expression.

Besides, you can create your own functions using Python (no VBScript or JsScript). For this purpose, you have a separate tab with a function editor. The editor have code highlighting and save your functions in your user area, making it available for later use (even for other QGIS sessions).

Conclusion

These are certainly not the only QGIS features that I miss, and they are probably not the most limiting ones (for instance, not being able to fully work with Spatialite and Postgis databases will make, for sure, my life miserable in the near future), but they were the ones I noticed right away when I (re)open ArcGIS for the first time.

I also feel that, based on the QGIS current development momentum, with each QGIS Changelog, the list will grow very fast. And although I haven’t tested ArcGIS Pro, I don’t think ESRI will be able to keep the pace.

“Are there things I still miss from ArcGIS?” Sure. I miss CMYK color support while exporting maps, for instance. But not as much as I miss QGIS now. Besides, I know that those will be addressed sooner or later.

In the end, I kinda enjoyed the opportunity to go back to ArcGIS, as it reinforced the way I think about QGIS. It’s all about freedom! Not only the freedom to use the software (that I was already aware) but also the freedom to control software itself and it’s outputs. Maintaining the users friendliness for new users, a lot have been done to make power users life easier, and they feel very pleased with it (at least I am).

All this being said, the winner is… QGIS!!

The End

(of a very biased post)

Dear QGIS developers

This year, just like in the previous years, we will have two developer-centric hackfests, where we invite coders, documenters, testers, graphic artists, translators, and anyone else who is interested in improving QGIS for the benefit of all our users:

May 27th-29th in Girona, Spain

… right after the 2nd International QGIS User and Developer Conference and the Jornadas SIG Libre, and

August 21st-23rd & 27th-28th in Bonn, Germany

… together with the FOSS4G 2016 Code Sprint before and after the conference

The QGIS hackfests are an important aspect of the project, playing a key role in facilitating collaboration and planning within the community of developers and contributors who combine their efforts to put out three releases of QGIS each year. We rely on the goodwill and sponsorship of our grateful users and their host organisations to financially sustain the QGIS project. If you are in a position of influence, we ask you to please consider sponsoring QGIS to support this hackfest and other project related activities.

We look forward to seeing you all there!

The QGIS Team

Press release

From March 2016 onwards, Dr. Markus Neteler, a prominent head of the Open Source GIS scene, will join the management board of mundialis GmbH & Co. KG in Bonn, Germany. Founded in 2015, mundialis combines remote sensing and satellite data analysis in the field of Big Data with Open Source WebGIS solutions.

Since 2008, Dr. Neteler was the head of the GIS and remote sensing unit at the Edmund Mach Foundation in Trento (Italy) and worked in this capacity on numerous projects related to biodiversity, environmental and agricultural research. He is also a founding member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), a nonprofit organization with headquarters in Delaware (USA), that promotes the development and use of free and open source geographic information systems (GIS). Since 1998 he coordinated the development of the well known GRASS GIS software project, a powerful Open Source GIS that supports processing of time series of several thousand raster, 3D raster or vector maps in a short time.

Markus will keep his role as “Mr. GRASS” at mundialis, especially because the company also sees itself as a research and development enterprise that puts its focus on the open source interfaces between geoinformation and remote sensing. Although a new company, mundialis offers more than 50 years of experience in GIS, due to the background of its management. Besides Neteler, there are Till Adams and Hinrich Paulsen, both at the same time the founders and CEOs of terrestris in Bonn, a company that develops Open Source GIS solutions since 2002. These many years of experience in the construction of WebGIS and Geoportal architectures using free software as well as in the application of common OGC standards – are now combined with mundialis’ expertise in the processing of big data with spatial reference and remote sensing data.

Contact: http://www.mundialis.de/

The post Markus Neteler joins the management of mundialis in Bonn appeared first on GFOSS Blog | GRASS GIS Courses.

The latest bug fix releases 2.8.6 and 2.12.3 have been released according to our release road map.

For a list of fixed issues see the commits to 2.8 and commits to 2.12, respectively.

Many of you out there may be wondering ‘when are we going to release QGIS 3.0?’. Last year (2015) we started investigating when and how we would release QGIS 3.0. We promised (see Anita Graser’s post about this) that we would convey clearly to our users and developers our plans well before making the QGIS 3.0 release. In this post I will try to lay out some of the considerations for a QGIS 3.0 release and at the end of this post there is an opportunity for you to present your ideas.

Why 3.0?

Typically (when following semantic versioning) a major release is reserved for times when you break the API of your software. Breaking API is not a trivial decision for the QGIS project since we have hundreds of thousands of users out there who depend on QGIS to ‘just work’, and many developers who need to maintain third party software written on top of the QGIS API.

From time to time breaking the API is necessary to accommodate updating the architecture with improved approaches, new base libraries and fixes to sub-optimal decisions made in the past.

What are the implications of breaking the API?

One of the reasons we are hesitant about releasing an API breaking QGIS 3.0 release is that it will have a huge impact, potentially breaking the hundreds of plugins in the plugin repository. Plugins would no longer compatible with new API and plugin authors would be required to manually review their plugins to identify and update  the places in their plugins where the code is no longer compatible with the new API.

The breadth of the updates required depends largely on

• how many backwards incompatible changes we make to the API
• how many places plugin authors have used parts of the API which have changed

I will talk more about how we can mitigate API breaking changes  further on in this article.

What will be the key changes for 3.0?

There are four key areas that we are looking to change in 3.0:

• Updating Qt4 to Qt5: This is the basic set of libraries on which QGIS is built and provides a high level, platform independent abstraction layer for building a graphical user application. Qt also provides libraries for carrying out disk i/o, networking operations, and graphics drawing operations (key functionality for QGIS). Qt4 (on which QGIS is currently based) is now not actively being developed by the Qt library maintainers and we are expecting to experience problems in the near future building Qt4 for some platforms (e.g. OS X) or having readily accessible binaries  (e.g. Debian Testing and the upcoming release of Debian “Stretch”). Making QGIS work with Qt5 has already been worked on (chiefly by Matthias Kuhn) who together with Marco Bernasocchi produce the Android “QField” port of QGIS which is based completely on Qt5. There are however some outstanding limitations in the newer Qt5 that impact on QGIS – in particular with the embedded web browser widgets (used chiefly in the QGIS composer but also a few other places in QGIS).
• Updating PyQt4 to PyQt5: These are the python language bindings for Qt which the QGIS python API relies on. When we shift to the Qt5 C++ library, we also want to shift to the updated PyQt5 python library so that we can benefit from the new Qt5 API within the python environment too.
• Updating Python 2.7 to Python 3: Currently we bundle in Python 2.7 in our windows installers and require 2.7 on other platforms where we do not co-bundle Python with QGIS. Python 3 is the latest version of python and is recommended by the Python project. Python 2 is slightly incompatible with Python 3 (in much the same way as QGIS 2 -> QGIS 3 will be incompatible). The python developers have made Python 3 largely backwards compatible to Python 2, but the compatibility in the opposite direction is not as good.
• Improving the QGIS API itself: One of the issues with maintaining API compatibility between releases is that you have to live with your design choices for a long time. In QGIS we try our best not to break the API within a minor release series – not always with success as the more hard core developers will attest to. Releasing an API incompatible version of QGIS for 3.0 will give us an opportunity to ‘clean house’ by fixing things in the API that we are unhappy with. You can see a provisional list of proposed API changes for 3.0 by looking at the 3.0 API issues list.

Mitigating 3.0 API breakages

As I mentioned the 3.0 release will break API from the 2.x release of QGIS and there is the potential that many existing plugins, applications and other code that rely on the current API will be broken. So what can we do to mitigate the changes? Matthias Kuhn, Jürgen Fischer, Nyall Dawson, Martin Dobias and other core developers have been looking at ways to mitigate the number of API breaking changes whilst still advancing the QGIS codebase to be based on the next generation of libraries and its own internal API. During our last QGIS Project Steering Committee meeting we ran through various possibilities. Matthias Kuhn kindly joined the meeting to help clarify our options going forward which I have tried to summarise in the table below:

There are two key things to note about Matthias’ proposal:

• In the first phase, work would be done in the QGIS 2.x series to complete support for Qt5, PyQt5, Python 3.0 whilst still supporting Qt4, PyQt4 and Python 2.7. This implies that all changes made in the first phase would be backwards compatible with previous QGIS 2.x releases. Python wrappers will be introduced so that the old PyQt4 API can still mostly be used when compiling against Qt5, PyQt5, Python 3.0. When using QGIS compiled against Qt4, PyQt4 and Python 2.7 there would be no compatibility breakage.
• In the second phase, we would work to produce QGIS 3.0 which introduces a number of API breaking changes, completely removing Python 2.7, Qt4 and PyQt4 support. The python wrappers produced in the first phase would be kept and relied on to ensure that a large proportion of python code (plugins, scripts etc.) developed for QGIS 2.x releases continue to work in QGIS 3.x releases. In this phase we would also introduce the QGIS API changes which may break some plugins. To address this we will provide a migration guide to try to ease the process for those moving from code depending on the QGIS 2.x releases to the QGIS 3.x releases.

Caveat emptor

There are a couple of ‘gotchas’ that we should raise at this point as the above makes the migration to QGIS 3.0 sound fairly painless.

1. The first thing we should emphasise is that while the approach laid out above tries to minimise the amount of work python script and plugins writers have to do, this will not be a 100% effort free solution for python coders using QGIS. There will very likely be cases where code needs to be adjusted and in all cases at the very least it will probably need to be reviewed in order to ensure that it still functions properly.
2. There is no formal funding set aside to pay for developers to spend their time working on the migration process. Because of this it is going to be incredibly hard to give accurate timelines as to how long each part of the process will take. We need to take this uncertainty into account in our planning. Of course we welcome donations to help make this happen.
3. There may be developers and institutions out there funding new features for the QGIS 2.x series and this may affect your work. You should include in your project plans and budgets some allocation to cope with the migration to the QGIS 3.x platform.
4. If we do the work in the ‘master branch’ there may be a protracted time during which our master branch is unstable and in flux due to ongoing updates towards QGIS 3.0.
5. If we do the work in a ‘3.0 branch’, we run the risk that the 3.0 development may drag on longer unless there is a devoted group of developers working on it and getting it ready to merge to master.

Proposals

In the light of all the above information, we propose one of two courses of action:

Proposal 1:

Do an interim release of 2.16 and then commence work on 3.0 in master with an 8 month development window. Work on 3.0 related stuff could already begin in 2.16  (see python3/pytq5), only incompatible changes have to be postponed to post 2.16.

Advantage: Main focus of work would be in master branch. Work scheduled for the near future can be released in expected timelines. Plugins will continue to work with master. People can start to write and test their code in a portable manner.

Disadvantage: Difficult to determine timelines as we don’t have funding

Proposal 2:

Create a long running 3.0 branch for the port to Qt5, Python 3.0 and PyQt5 and call for developers to get their 3.0 work in there. Continue with 2.x releases with the usual frequency until 3.0 is ready.

Advantage: We can release it ‘when it’s ready’. If there is no funding for 3.0 work subsequent releases are not jeopardised.

Disadvantage: Duplication of effort as work in master coming in needs to be ported over to the 3.0 branch.

Alternative proposals

Do you have an alternative proposal? We would like to get all the proposals on the table so that we (the PSC in consultation with core developers) can make the best judgement of how to approach the nitty-gritty process of managing the QGIS 3.0 development process. If you wish to submit a proposal, please send it to me ([email protected]) with the subject line ‘QGIS 3.0 Proposal‘. Please keep your proposal very short and succinct as we just need the high level concepts.

Here is the proposal submitted by Matthias Kuhn that you can use as a reference of how we might like  a proposal to look:

QGIS 2.16 Release as usual in 4 months

-> PyQt5 Support
-> Python 3 Support
-> Wrapper library for PyQt4/PyQt5
-> Maybe a helper transition script that does 80% of the rewrite
-> All old plugins still work
-> Some python code is updated (console, plugin manager, processing) to
have some guidelines and experience how to update python code
-> For future debian, mac osx… versions there’s a qt5 version around
(with almost no plugins working)

During the same time: make some noise that QGIS 3 is coming and we need
everybody to put some money and dev time aside for it and that it’s
going to be amazing.

—————-

After that: 8 months break for 3.0 (maybe some betas after 4 months and
every month after)

Back to normal, everybody happy – except the lazy plugin devs who didn’t
update –

Monday, January 4th 2016, was the open data release date of the official Austrian street network dataset called GIP.at. As far as I know, the dataset is not totally complete yet but it should be in the upcoming months. I’ve blogged about GIP.at before in Open source IDF parser for QGIS and Open source IDF router for QGIS where I was implementing tools based on the data samples that were available then. Naturally, I was very curious if my parser and particularly the router could handle the whole country release …

Some code tweaking, patience for loading, and 9GB of RAM later, QGIS happily routes through Austria, for example from my work place to Salzburg – maybe for some skiing:

The routing request itself takes something between 1 and 2 seconds. (I should still add a timer to it.)

So far, I’ve implemented shortest distance routing for pedestrians, bikes, and cars. Since the data also contains travel speeds, it should be quite straight-forward to also add shortest travel time routing.

The code is available on Github for you to try. I’d appreciate any feedback!

Mostly interesting for dutchies A short post that there is a new 0.10 version of the pdokservicesplugin (http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/pdokservicesplugin/), Some layers have been removed and some are new. The total number of layers is now 6723 (coming from 5298). Most important changes: Removed: – brtachtergrondtijdelijk – brtachtergrondgrijstijdelijk – top10nl (nu: top10nl2) – Noordzee Kabels en Leidingen … Continue reading PDOK services plugin update

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With the release of the first long term release (2.8 LTR), and two other stable versions (2.10 and 2.12), 2015 was a great (and busy) year for the QGIS community, with lots of improvements and new features landing on QGIS source code.

As a balance, I have asked users to choose wich were their favorite new features during 2015 (from the visual changelogs list). As a result I got the following Top 5 features list.

5 – Python console improvements (2.8)

Since QGIS 2.8, we can drag and drop python scripts into QGIS window and they will be executed automatically. There is also a new a toolbar icon in the plugins toolbar and a shortcut ( Ctrl-Alt-P) for quick access to the python console.

4 – Processing new algorithms (2.8)

Also in QGIS 2.8, there were introduced some new algorithms to the processing framework. If you are into spatial analysis this must have done your day (or year).

• Regular points algorithm
• Symmetrical difference algorithm
• Vector split algorithm
• Vector grid algorithm
• Hypsometric curves calculation algorithm
• Split lines with lines
• Refactor fields attributes manipulation algorithm

3 – Show rule-based renderer’s legend as a tree (2.8)

There were introduced a few nice improvements to QGIS legend. Version 2.8 brought us a tree presentation for the rule-based renderer. Better still, each node in the tree can be toggled on/off individually providing for great flexibility in which sublayers get rendered in your map.

2 – Advanced digitizing tools (2.8)

If you ever wished you could digitize lines exactly parallel or at right angles, lock lines to specific angles and so on in QGIS? Since QGIS 2.8 you can! The advanced digitizing tools are a port of the CADinput plugin and adds a new panel to QGIS. The panel becomes active when capturing new geometries or geometry parts.

1 – Rule-based labeling (2.12)

This was a very awaited feature (at least by me), and it was voted by the majority of users. Since 2.12, you can style features labels using rules. This gives us even more control over placement and styling of labels. Just like the rule based cartographic rendering, label rules can be nested to allow for extremely flexible styling options. For example, you can render labels differently based on the size of the feature they will be rendered into (as illustrated in the screenshot).

There were other new features that also made the delight of many users. For example, the Improved/consistent projection selection (2.8), PostGIS provider improvements (2.12), Geometry Checker and Geometry Snapper plugins (2.12), and Multiple styles per layer (2.8).

Don’t agree with this list? You can still cast your votes. You can also check the complete results in here.

Obviously, this list means nothing at all. I was a mere exercise as with such a diverse QGIS crowd it would be impossible to build a list that would fit us all. Besides, there were many great enhancements, introduced during 2015, that might have fallen under the radar for most users. Check the visual changelogs for a full list of new features.

On my behalf, to all developers, sponsors and general QGIS contributors,

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR TREMENDOUS WORK!

I wish you a fantastic (and productive) 2016.

Last summer, I had the pleasure to talk with UNIGIS Salzburg about the QGIS project: how it works and what makes it great. Now, finally, the video is out on Youtube:

Amongst other things, we are discussing the UNIGIS module on QGIS, which I have been teaching for the past few months.