QField Data Collection Strategies
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00:00
Software developerCore dumpOpen sourceForm (programming)Artistic renderingDisintegrationEndliche ModelltheorieRelational databaseInternetworkingMobile WebTrailForestAreaPlot (narrative)Multiplication2 (number)Software maintenanceVideoconferencingOrder (biology)Point (geometry)Data managementTheory of relativityGeometryPolygonQuicksortData modelProjective planeTouchscreenNeuroinformatikMobile appINTEGRALoutputTablet computerPresentation of a groupBitAreaField (computer science)Power (physics)Revision controlSinc functionArrow of timeDirection (geometry)SoftwareForm (programming)WordForestStandard deviationOpen sourceStrategy gameCASE <Informatik>Software developerFiber bundleInformationMultiplication tableQuantum gravityCartesian coordinate systemWave packetSet (mathematics)Type theoryInternetworkingConnected spaceLine (geometry)Multiplication signNetwork topologyInformation technology consultingSoftware testingUsabilityEndliche ModelltheorieAutomatic differentiationBasis <Mathematik>PurchasingStress (mechanics)Process (computing)Computer animation
07:00
MultiplicationComputer networkNetzwerkverwaltungFiber (mathematics)SynchronizationServer (computing)Formal verificationTrailDatabasePoint cloudMultiplication signGroup actionGeometryAdditionMereologyMobile appProduct (business)Field (computer science)QuicksortInformationFile archiverCore dumpBasis <Mathematik>Proper mapService (economics)SoftwarePlug-in (computing)Office suiteDatabaseLibrary (computing)Different (Kate Ryan album)Projective planeAttribute grammarCASE <Informatik>TrailServer (computing)Level (video gaming)Self-organizationFiber (mathematics)TouchscreenPoint (geometry)Strategy gameMathematicsSinc functionProcess (computing)SynchronizationConnected spaceTimestampInternet service providerReal-time operating systemPhysical systemSystem callPoint cloudVideo gameQueue (abstract data type)ChainPhysical lawUsabilityComputer animation
13:52
Point cloudTrailDatabaseSynchronizationMultiplicationServer (computing)SynchronizationMereologyINTEGRALServer (computing)Service (economics)Uniform resource locatorInformationPoint cloudProduct (business)Computer programmingScheduling (computing)Local ringSelf-organizationSmartphoneEvent horizonComplete metric spaceType theoryAttribute grammarKey (cryptography)TimestampKeyboard shortcutDigital photographyGoodness of fitComputer configurationBitSlide rulePattern recognitionCovering spaceSoftware developerGame controllerPhysical systemFunctional (mathematics)PlanningMedical imagingRandomizationPresentation of a groupTrailSoftware bugoutputField (computer science)TheoryWritingGoogolStatisticsGraph (mathematics)Disk read-and-write headComputer animation
20:45
Projective planeLetterpress printingAreaSet (mathematics)MathematicsConfiguration spaceComputer fileRevision controlProbability density functionServer (computing)Service (economics)Tablet computerProcess (computing)Presentation of a groupSynchronizationFunctional (mathematics)InformationoutputCommunications protocolMultiplication signOffice suiteLevel (video gaming)Series (mathematics)1 (number)Pattern recognitionField (computer science)Exterior algebraQR codeOpen sourceINTEGRALMobile appGoodness of fitNeuroinformatikData conversionDirected graphRow (database)State of matterPlanningCuboidDrop (liquid)Inclined planeComputer clusterBitLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Matias, you're going to tell us about new stuff in here and what's happening in the strategies on how to work in the field. So, it's all yours. Am I on time? Just because I think the videos are automatically cut at...
00:23
So we have to wait another 20 seconds or so? Yeah, something like that. We can flip. Yeah. Can you tell us the joke? No. No, that would be really bad. I mean, that would be really bad. Okay, so, okay, I'll just hand you the mic and you can fill up your time and start whenever you like. Enjoy.
00:45
Thank you, Eric. And it's actually right now, 5 o'clock, so I'm going to start. First, with a short introduction about myself, I'm a bit worried about seeing my face that big on the screen. But anyway, so I'm an application engineer by training and also a geographer.
01:03
I study geography and application engineering and that's what I've been doing for the past couple of years, open source. I've been quite heavily involved with QG's development. And meanwhile, I'm the co-owner of a company called OpenJS.ch.
01:23
We are based in whole Switzerland, which if you happen to know is quite multilingual. So we're all also quite multilingual there and do just like consulting and development and all sorts of things and still have a very, very strong base in QGIS but like doing all the way to like Postgres
01:43
and also, of course, like Qfield is one of our most beloved babies that I will be presenting today. But it's actually not going to be a standard presentation feature frenzy. I thought that it will be fun to just have some people that we join on their way to the field
02:03
and see how they work with the data, how the data flows while they're working out on the field. So before we start, I think I still need to lose some initial words at least about Qfield, about the app. I guess many of you have seen it before so I'm not going to fill the next 20 minutes with new features.
02:24
Let's start. So it's basically a field data collection app. It has all the power of QGIS rendering below and it's got the support for custom forms. It's actually pretty much similar, pretty similar to what we've seen in the last presentation about input because it was like the basis for input.
02:43
Whereas, so that's like why there are very a lot of things that are shared between the two apps. It is possible to add and edit spatial data. So you can add and edit geometries, all sorts of like points and polygons and lines and you can also edit them and we're going to add some more features in this area.
03:05
I don't think I'll have the time to talk about new features but maybe I will. Of course, it has a GPS integration and it has also support for relational data models meaning that you can have multiple tables so you feel like child features or child entries
03:21
of existing features and so on. So let's start with Matteo. Matteo is a biologist. Matteo is actually working on his own and he does not always have internet connection when he goes out. He likes to go to the forest and he just mostly, well he needs to know
03:43
when he is somewhere out there on the field, he needs to know where he is and to see what like the soil type is where he is. So what Matteo does is he prepares at home at his QGIS desktop.
04:02
He prepares himself a data set in a geo package and he's just packaging all that up and puts it onto his mobile phone or tablet and just takes it out and out there he can use Qfield to work with the data to see where he is, use the GPS and request detailed information about where he is.
04:24
That's quite a trivial use case to do with probably any app out there. So let's straight go to the second person of today which is Maya the beekeeper. I don't know if some of you have come across Maya so far already at this conference. If you didn't, in the end I'll introduce her a bit more
04:42
and give you an outlook on what else she does. So she's actually retired and working now as a beekeeper which is mostly a hobby for her but she also does it to get a bit of money and she's also working on her own and she wants to know like how her beehives are doing so she just goes there but she doesn't just only check what's going on,
05:05
she actually needs to edit the data on the field of course and sometimes adds new beehives when she's out there and looking for them. So it's pretty much the same setup. She can also package her geo package and put it on the tablet
05:22
and then start working it but we see that this arrow here is actually now pointing in two directions so she can actually also change the data in her geo package but since she's just working on her own, since there is no risk of conflicts etc. in the end she can just go back, come back to the office
05:41
and use the same geo package that she's been using out there back onto her QGIS and continue working there with whatever data she collected out there. That brings us straight to our third friend which is Florin Florin is a forestry manager and he has a team of roughly 30 field workers
06:05
which are out there and they check actually for the safety of all the forest out there so they need to go out and check all the trees, how they do if there is like some sick trees, some illnesses, maybe something dangerous from the last storm they had
06:21
and they need to report it back in order to plan for the whole maintenance of these forests. Luckily, all over the area there is at least a 3G data coverage in the mobile network so he does set up where he doesn't really need offline data at all
06:44
so he's just always working online He's preparing himself, Florin, on his desktop computer as you can see there and the project in QGIS and then puts this project onto his mobile phone but he doesn't put any data there
07:02
all he puts there is a QGIS project with a Postgres connection since Qfield is based on QGIS it is also like access to many, many, many, many different data providers one of them is our most beloved Postgres and PostGIS provider so they can all work in parallel on the data and they see in real time what happens
07:22
and actually Florin has put up a screen somewhere in his office where he has put a live layer in QGIS so whenever someone changes the data a second later it just pops up in his office and he can see how people are doing out there Then there is also Nadia
07:44
Nadia works for a fibre network company and she has quite a big team for who she is responsible and they need to make sure that the whole fibre network is stable and that they know where their subscribers are
08:00
and to do that she has quite a big team of people out there Unfortunately, or however, just as live is they sometimes also need to be somewhere on the ground to fix their cables so they do not always have data coverage so when they go down there they really want the things to be offline
08:21
so what she did in the first step was she set up a Postgres database which is quite a nice thing to have anyway in a big organisation and then uses QGIS desktop to prepare her project and actually prepares projects for all the mobile phones in parallel with a geo package there to work on
08:43
and then synchronises them back later on So what these geo packages do is next to just only having written the data directly into it they also need to record what changes are being done all the time
09:00
so they write a log of what is going on so for every new feature that is added they write it into the log history for every attribute that is changed or geometry that is changed it's going to be written into the log history inside this geo package and whenever one comes back from a field trip and synchronises the data back to the server that's going to be applied step by step onto the server
09:25
so that's how things are replayed later on However, she thinks it would be nice if not every one of our users would always have to use QGIS or me myself, I always have to prepare the project for them all the time
09:40
So what she did she was just implementing on the server by using the QGIS libraries and Python the very same thing that the QFieldSync plugin does on her desktop and just does it on the server and prepares that on a nightly basis the latest dump from the server for all the mobile phones which are synchronised with ThinkThing or some other sort of app like Dropbox
10:06
and then it's very much the same thing just that all the things are automated and things are synchronised and people do not need to click and load the data all the time So, she thinks that's all nice and good
10:21
but hey, sometimes our people are not perfect and they do sometimes make a mistake so why don't we add some additional things for quality assurance so whenever people come back from the field it's very easy to do a typo sometimes you just have some things
10:42
that are wrong points which are not where they belong to be and to do this kind of thing she adds an additional step hey, thanks an additional step in between here we are right, yes, that's it so she added on top of all that system
11:02
an additional layer and what this layer here does is it filters the data and actually takes it from their production database and sends from the production database in their nightly synchronisation jobs out to the mobile fields however, whenever people come back from the field
11:23
what happens in the database is that some checks are applied to it like if the points are in the region where they belong to if some basic sanity checks of all the attributes apply and so on and if everything is well they go directly into the production database however, there is a second database
11:41
which is called the quarantine which is just there for quality assurance so whenever some of these basic sanity checks fail things will be stored in the quarantine and will stay in there until someone takes care of it that means we have someone that is probably Nadia again
12:01
or one of her co-workers in the office just checking what's up in the quarantine and in case of trouble in case there is something wrong most likely she just takes her phone and calls someone and asks what the reality was like there corrects it and as soon as it is corrected it goes also into production and when it ends up in production it's there
12:20
so we have an additional step of quarantine and quality assurance in there one day she calls us and says hey there is an issue we have these service level agreements with our customers so we need to know who actually took all the information out there
12:42
so I need to have a proper audit trail to see who changed what and at what time and how so for that she modifies her database once again and that's a third copy of the data which is an archive inside the archive she has a copy
13:01
of all the data that she has also in the production and whenever something changes in production it is updated in the archive with a timestamp of when it has changed and who has changed it and actually even in the quarantine if something comes in from the field and goes into the quarantine it is also put into the archive
13:22
so we know like okay so somebody took this information from the field then later on it was by some professional in the office edited to go into production and that way she has quite a good overview of what is happening out there and if there is some legal issues coming up she can track down
13:40
who it was and what actions to take so that was it for the whole field strategies part already I realized that I was quite fast on that we are also soon
14:00
going to launch an additional service which is Qfield cloud Qfield cloud is going to be much easier than the setups that you have seen here before but it is going to integrate it is going to be a hosted service that we are going to develop and offer with a nice Qfield integration for synchronization
14:22
of the data for offline and online things so if you would like to know more about that you better drop by at our booth and talk to us what exactly the plans are and I have also the pleasure to announce a crowdfunding initiative
14:40
we have actually spent even though I didn't talk about all the features that we have done in Qfield we have done a lot of things we have done a lot of development in Qfield and we would like now to give you all the possibility to contribute back and as a very first thing
15:01
it is a long standing issue we would like to improve on the gallery on the photo possibilities right now we have an internal thing as a workaround for a bug which we have with the Android camera so once we have got that fixed we will be able to use the native Android camera again which means that we can
15:21
have active information about the location directly in the images and using the native Android camera with all the cool features like HDR and whatever they can do with these native cameras which the people who develop the cell phones actually are much better than we are and there will also be support for naming
15:40
your images so you can have the image names actually referring to the feature they are for and not just with a random time stamp so we would really appreciate it a lot if you would check out the crowdfunding that we are that we are launching now so
16:00
already at 15 minutes like my last talk before oh I see a lot of hands coming up that's when you have stopped at 15 minutes already thank you so it's a very interesting and excellent system so I
16:22
would like to ask about the quality control could you back to the slide for the quality control there are many slides but this one yeah this one yeah anyway so for example if you find something else from the data of mobile then instead of going back to the server so you can
16:41
if you find the QGIS desktop you can correct immediately so that could be an option so why don't you correct the data not from the server side but from the desktop QGIS so I realize I was a bit
17:01
too quick and I could have spent one more minute explaining more in detail how that happens exactly so it's really actually QGIS desktop which does the whole correction so the things like all the data that comes from the mobile part goes first into the quarantine and stays in here if there is some problems or it goes
17:21
directly up there to fix the things in here people use QGIS desktop so that's that's how it does hi thanks for the presentation nice way of presenting the
17:41
functionality so I became interested in our characters and especially Maya the beekeeper and I have two questions concerning her I mean first of all does she take photos of the beehives and the second thing is when she goes and puts in a new beehive her clothes are you know all the all the covers and all of that it's
18:01
difficult to type on the keyboard so can she use voice recognition or something like that to input data good question good question okay so that's some really good questions there actually
18:22
what she does for for the photos you asked of course she takes photos of the beehives because she loves bees and she loves photos so why not combine the two for the second question she had some trouble in the beginning with actually typing
18:40
with her gloves so now she has some gloves which have a tactile front so she can actually type but it's still quite hard to reach all the individual keys so what she does is she uses this like on the Google keyboard you have this this microphone and if you type it's like voice to text so she just uses that and most
19:01
of the things are anyway like structured well structured attributes and data schema so there's not big of an issue of writing too much sorry yeah yeah auto completion on voice yeah yeah that's when that's when the
19:21
smartphone is smarter than you what's next so there was a question about that I promised in the beginning
19:41
to tell more about Maya that's actually gonna be this event here so tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm it's not the Bolero room I found out today I was once informed that it's the Bolero room in fact it's another one Corale maybe
20:01
okay best bet from the local organization community is Corale look it up it's in the program in the schedule as well we're gonna tell you much more about Maya and we'll also see some of her friends again and it's what it is QGIS on the road it's a short introduction
20:21
or not so short introduction actually it's like three sessions one after each other it's a full track it's a lot of information about how you can use QGIS and it's actually told by Maya, Maya the retired retired GIS specialist who is now a beekeeper and she's building up all her
20:41
honey production and all the things that she runs into throughout her journey with her bees and it's quite an entertaining way of seeing what you can do with QGIS and all the functionality from very basic things but I'm pretty sure even for some of the very experienced people there are some new things
21:01
to be seen in there so we'd love to have you joined there Hi you had a cool presentation congratulations I have a question about what happens when the field guys come back to office is there some kind
21:21
of an automated process of transferring the data from the tablet or the mobile to the local server or just copy paste from folder the job package this is done by
21:40
file synchronization service so it's like syncing but you can also use Dropbox to accomplish the same kind of thing and it's just like during the night the file in there is replaced by the server with the latest version that is produced on the server from the latest data set whereas every evening when you go home and you are in your Wi-Fi area
22:00
your local changes are uploaded pushed to the server to be taken into account there directly from the tablet yes yes there's quite a couple of apps that allow you to synchronize from the tablet and from the computer sync thing sync thing sync like S Y and C thing like
22:22
T H I N G that's an open source app I think it's using the BitTorrent protocol Tim not no idea good but used to be called BitTorrent sync alternative and sync thing is an open alternative to that ok so
22:42
ok so latest information from the back corner is it was originally called BT sync BitTorrent sync two different projects ok there was BT sync which was renamed to Resilio and this one is an open
23:00
alternative to that other project but they all used the BitTorrent P2P protocol poo got it right we still have time for more questions if there are yeah sure you can ask too very good question so why not GeoServer
23:29
well I think it would deserve some more information on how they would integrate perfectly with GeoServer so if you think that's a super good idea
23:41
just come by and I think we need to have this bilateral discussion so far it's like pretty much Q G I S integrated all the things like all the symbology and so on is it's very Q G I S centric so specific and I'm not sure how well GeoServer works with that
24:01
but maybe there is some smart some smart way of combining the two things then we're very open to inputs alright who else? Tim always has about four questions
24:22
do you want a friendly question or a difficult question what about what about what about supporting taking little video clips and reading QR codes so that you can barcode your beehives and scan those that would be very nice
24:47
that was the nice one I think no that would be nice actually before that even I would I would love to have audio integration
25:01
voice recording integration because I think like yeah maybe the voice recognition works quite nice in English but like in Swiss German Google is not able to handle it yet properly and I'm okay with them not handling it actually but anyway yeah NSA
25:21
probably going to handle it but they're not opening up their services yeah that would be really nice and we've planned to come up with a series of crowd fundings so I think that's going to be on one of the on one of the upcoming ones that will be a really nice functionality
25:42
now the easy question what if I'm in the field and I need to make a map in a PDF of what I've just been recording well then you need to create a print composer before configure your QGIS project
26:02
to have a print composer and then you'd well just create a PDF yes you can do it ladies and gentlemen