QGIS Plugins - From Must-Haves to insider tips
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| Number of Parts | 183 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 3.0 Germany: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/32066 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2015 | |
| Production Place | Seoul, South Korea |
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Goodness of fitRankingElectronic mailing list2 (number)Multiplication signSource codeNumberOperator (mathematics)Ocean currentUniform resource locatorRevision controlRun time (program lifecycle phase)Plug-in (computing)Computer chessWeb browserInternet service providerMappingMedical imagingBookmark (World Wide Web)WordVideo gameMatching (graph theory)Shape (magazine)Table (information)Data structureIntegerBitBlock (periodic table)Exterior algebraComputer programmingFunctional (mathematics)Set (mathematics)Service (economics)Type theorySelf-organizationSoftware developerSimilarity (geometry)File formatMathematical analysisAlgorithmWavePole (complex analysis)MereologyField (computer science)Core dumpInsertion lossVotingOpen sourceComputer-aided designOpen setSoftware testingMenu (computing)Group actionRepository (publishing)Macro (computer science)TouchscreenProcess (computing)TesselationServer (computing)Mobile appAuthorizationInstallation artData managementDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Search algorithmScale (map)DigitizingComputer animation
08:25
DatabaseCore dumpCombinational logicPlug-in (computing)AuthorizationSkeleton (computer programming)MappingWeb 2.0Server (computing)ReliefMathematical analysisWeb applicationRaster graphicsLimit (category theory)Profil (magazine)Functional (mathematics)Level (video gaming)Open setMultiplication signData managementMehrplatzsystemMedical imagingDigital photographyOrthogonalityResampling (statistics)Point cloudVector spacePoint (geometry)View (database)AlgorithmGraph coloringRevision controlSystem administratorTable (information)WindowOnline helpComputer chessForestBlock (periodic table)Direction (geometry)Data storage deviceClassical physicsService (economics)Process (computing)Set (mathematics)Goodness of fitRhombusDecision theoryCartesian coordinate systemNumeral (linguistics)AreaTwitterTouchscreenWeightElectronic mailing listTerm (mathematics)Replication (computing)Execution unitMereologyDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Subject indexingParallel portMathematicsSpectrum (functional analysis)Expert systemRegulator gene
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Service (economics)Block (periodic table)Image processingQuery languagePlug-in (computing)Multiplication signInformation systemsCodeSoftware developerPoint (geometry)PlanningLevel (video gaming)Client (computing)MassEndliche ModelltheorieSatelliteType theoryDifferent (Kate Ryan album)DebuggerDependent and independent variablesControl flowSet (mathematics)Drop (liquid)Local ringSpeech synthesisComputer fileMathematicsVisualization (computer graphics)Cartesian coordinate systemElectric generatorProcess (computing)Natural numberUniverse (mathematics)InternetworkingIncidence algebraOcean currentCondition numberState observerIntegrated development environmentStandard deviationSystem callTerm (mathematics)Mathematical optimizationWordDenial-of-service attackWeightIdentity managementMetropolitan area networkDatabaseProjective planeNumberBayesian networkLibrary catalogPeer-to-peerHazard (2005 film)Web 2.0Remote procedure callTwitterINTEGRALInterface (computing)Core dumpLibrary (computing)Metasearch engineWater vaporBuildingRevision controlDirection (geometry)Data management
25:08
Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:03
Good morning everybody. I welcome you to this first session, a short session before lunch with two talks. The first one about QGIS and the second one about an app server. The first talk is about QGIS plugins. It's an
00:23
introduction into about 30 plugins to show what you should have a look at when you use QGIS. A few words about me. My name is Peter Mikaalbeder. I'm working for Sourcepol,
00:40
located in Zurich, Switzerland, and our company is doing QGIS development. We're providing services, support for QGIS and to other open source JS development. I guess everyone knows QGIS. It's a full-featured desktop JS.
01:06
It supports many formats. It's expandable, and that's the reason I can give this talk. There are C++ plugins and Python plugins, and Python plugins are far easier, and so there are many more Python plugins.
01:23
It's customizable. It supports also being a server, so you can operate QGIS as a server and provide WMS and other OGC services. And we support Windows, Linux, and Mac OS, and it's open source.
01:46
You can write your own plugins, as I said, and many plugins are published, and the public repository is plugins.qgis.org, and there you find more than 500 plugins
02:03
for different different topics. It's very easy to search them and to install new plugins. Within QGIS you have this plugins menu and manage and install plugins, and there you have a list of all
02:24
plugins fitting your version, and that's sometimes a topic because there are usually three releases of QGIS per year, so there might be, when you update, that a certain plugin is not available for your QGIS version or
02:45
it's not another version, not that version that you want, so one tip I can give here is to use the LTR version of QGIS,
03:00
so the current LTR version is 2.8 which is maintained for one year, and the others have a short-lived life. So that's the plugin manager, and you can
03:23
write a part of the name into the search field and you get a list of matching plugins, and you can install them, update them, or uninstall them, so that's very easy. On plugins.qgis.org there is also a
03:43
list sorted by downloads, and so I start with this list. So the top downloads of the non-core plugins is, number one, the OpenLayers plugin. Here you see quite an old screenshot that was when I presented it the first time in
04:04
QGIS user group Switzerland. I think it was 2010. It has 460,000 downloads and shows Google Maps, Bing, and OpenStreetMap, like Ground Maps.
04:22
So it's very handy if you need this kind of imagery. Download number two. Almost downloaded. The second rank is the table manager. It's quite an old plugin and
04:45
many of its functionalities now included in QGIS Core as well, but it's still useful if you want to modify table structures of many of shapefiles.
05:03
And number three is this mmqgis. That mm is from Michael Min, the author of this plugin, and it's a big collection of algorithms for processing, analysis, and so on. Same story here. Many of these
05:22
algorithms are now also included in the processing core plugin, but they are still useful algorithms, which are only here. The first topic I want to touch is digitizing.
05:43
For a long time, CAD-like digitizing needed plugins, and the CAD tools plugin was a long time favorite. It was number one for a long time, and there's another one, CAD digitize.
06:02
But since 2.8, there is also CAD-like digitizing integrated in the core. So it's a core plugin now.
06:22
Here I have some important helpers. For me, one of the most important things is a geolocation search. I need that all the time, and there are many different. I prefer the quick finder plugin.
06:41
The main reason is that it's very modular program, so you can extend, you can add your own search providers and search algorithms. It supports OpenStreetMap and two Swiss providers for now, but it's really easy to extend if you know a little bit of Python.
07:04
Then there are other alternatives, OSM play search is a good one, geocoding, and there are even more. Another very handy thing is the tile map scale plugin, which
07:28
gives you another way for background maps. It's different, technically different from the OpenLayers plugin, but does similar things.
07:40
But it does really get directly, it gets directly the tiles from the provider. And the reason that OpenLayers plugin still exists is that this is not allowed for some providers like Google Maps. You are not allowed to get the tiles directly, so you have to do it with a
08:00
web client like OpenLayers. And for other providers it's better to use a tool like that, the tile map scale plugin, or the tile layer plugin, which is a similar one, and here you can add your own data sources
08:20
supporting tiles. Next helper is DockableMirrorMap, not so well known. It gives you the ability to
08:42
have more than one map view at the same time. You can synchronize these map views. So this example shows a vector map and the synchronized ortho photo showing the same area, and you can have more, even more maps or views.
09:07
There is a quite new similar plugin, auxiliary window. I just saw the author coming in. Ah, he's there.
09:21
So maybe this fits your needs better. You can look at both and compare them. I like this one very much. Another plugin is the Time Manager. It's quite well known.
09:43
It's for visualizing temporal data. So if you have different, more than one time or, you know,
10:00
temporal data, I can't say it better, and want to animate that, you can even make a movie out of out of that, so this is the plugin you need then. A few plugins for doing raster, work, to work with rasters. The profile tool
10:31
is a very good plugin. It gives you the possibility to make elevation profiles. It can compare layers.
10:42
You can export profiles, so that's really a handy tool when you're working with this kind of data. Another one is the raster terrain analysis plugin, which is a core plugin
11:04
written in C++. You can do many things with terrain data. You can have slopes, aspect hillshade, relief blockchains index, and it's very
11:23
customizable, so you can choose colors for hillshading, and it has really good algorithms for doing nice hillshades.
11:40
Another one is the semi-automatic classification plugin, so that goes a little bit further. So if you have raster data and want to do classification, then you should have a look at this plugin, which you can see from this screenshot is
12:01
quite has quite many features, and many dialogues, and so on, and many settings. But as soon as you're really into classification, then this is a plugin you have to look at.
12:23
This one, most of you will know, anyone who is geo-referencing within QGIS uses this core plugin, which is the geo-referencing plugin, which does referencing and resampling of raster data.
12:41
It's quite handy for geo-referencing images. Then some database tools. Another core plugin is the DB Manager. I mentioned that one because I
13:05
have the impression that it's not as used as much as it should be, because it's really a very useful and handy plugin. It gives you a quick insight into a spatial database. You can look into the tables, you can edit data in the tables, you can alter tables, you can
13:29
see spatial data in the tables. So you have a preview, but it's really a handy tool, and for many purposes it replaces
13:44
specialized administration tools like PG-Admin, so you can... Most of the things you have to do, you can do with the DB Manager itself. And you can drag and drop layers from here into QGIS.
14:07
Then offline editing is also a core plugin. It's not so well known either. What it does is it extracts a local
14:20
copy of your database, post.js database. It does an offline copy into spatial light, into a spatial light database, which you can edit offline, and if you're online again, you can synchronize with the master database. And this can be done in parallel, so multiple users can
14:44
have an offline database, edit it, and synchronize it with the master database. If you want to have things like conflict detection, you have to do versioning on the database.
15:04
But this is in use, and it's doable. It can be done with direct database rewrite or with WFST. There are many plugins for web mapping.
15:28
So there is the Exporter Open Layer 3 plugin, which helps you to create the Open Layer 3 map. So if you already have data in QGIS and
15:40
want to have a skeleton for Open Layers application, you can use this plugin. And the very similar one is QGIS2Leave, which does the same thing for leaflet. And in the meantime, there is also a combination of these two, which does both. I didn't check that one yet.
16:05
I don't know whether it has the full functionality of both, but then it would be interesting. I mean, there are always limits here, what you can do this way, but it's sometimes handy to have a starting point for a web application.
16:27
QGIS cloud debugging is somewhat related to that. With that debugging you can publish desktop maps on a cloud server. You upload data, and you upload the map, and you get OGC services, WMS, and
16:46
a map viewer, and a mobile map, and a lot more. Another one is QGIS23JS.
17:01
3JS is a JavaScript library for 3D visualization, and this plugin helps you to or creates HTML JavaScript files visualizing your local data. So you can do a 3D visualization with 3GS
17:25
based on your data with QGIS. More about OGC services. QGIS supports
17:43
WMS, WFS, WFST, WCS, and WMTS, and I guess more. What it doesn't support in the core is WPS, web processing service, and here is
18:01
the WPS client plugin available. So if you want to have a client for web processing services then there is the WPS client plugin. And another plugin
18:21
for OGC catalog services is the MetaSearch catalog client, which is also in the meantime a core plugin, so it's included, but most of these core plugins you have to activate. They are delivered bundled together with QGIS, but they are not, all of them are not activated when you start QGIS the first time,
18:47
so you have to activate them. I said QGIS has WFS support, but it's only WFS 1.0, and
19:00
if you need a WFS 2.0 client, then there is the WFS client plugin, which gives you a client for these special services like prepared queries or stored queries, which
19:21
WFS 2.0 service can provide. The next chapter is about custom solutions. That's
19:41
possible with QGIS, and to show a few big plugins, which are more like applications and not plugins, the Modusk plugin is one of these. It is for land-use changes, analyzing and modeling and simulating
20:03
land-use changes, and it's a rather sophisticated plugin. I think it's written in Japan. InnerSafe is another plugin, which is more like an application itself. It's for
20:24
response planning of natural hazard impact scenarios, so for flooding and so on, and you can visualize scenarios and build
20:40
response planning on top of that. Another big plugin is TIGERnet water observation and information system written by ESA, the European Space Agency. It's a project for water resource management in Africa, and this plugin does
21:07
different types of image processing of satellite data. There are many more plugins in these directions. Some of them, or a few of them, are published on
21:25
plugins.qgis.org because they are not of general use. It's really a very special topic, usually, but you can find them on the internet, and you can install them anyway. You only have to
21:42
unzip a plugin or to copy the plugin into your plugins directory. A few tips for plugin developers. One of the most important plugins for developers is the plugin builder,
22:02
which got a new version recently and is now based on templates, so you can not only generate one type of plugin, but you can select right now three types of plugins, so it's a processing plugin or a dialog example,
22:24
which gives you a starting point for your own plugin. Then another must-have plugin is the plugin reloader. If you're doing development and changing code, you don't want to resort QGIS all the time, and
22:42
that's the job of the plugin reloader, which can reload a plugin in a running QGIS. And one last tip is the remote debug plugin, which gives you the ability to set
23:02
breakpoints and so on, and interface with a debugger, currently the PyDev Eclipse environment, and the other one I can't remember. And yet the very last tip is this URL, geapis.sorple.com, which is a collection of APIs and has a
23:26
integrated API reference, searchable reference for QGIS, Python interface, and also the PyQt documentation, and also the Python documentation itself, so it's very handy.
23:45
If you want to have more news, you can look at the planet's QGIS.org blog, or follow the QGIS Twitter tag, and check if you want to check a plugin, look at plugins.org, has it be updated recently, has it
24:01
tickets to have an idea whether a plugin is currently maintained or not. Okay, that was my overview of QGIS plugins, and we have some time left for questions.
24:27
Any questions? No, it's really local data like database data. Yeah, I know.
24:47
I don't think so. I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think so. It's for local data. More questions, and thank you very much.