QField 3 - Fieldwork redefined
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FOSS4G Europe 2024 Tartu99 / 156
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00:00
GeometryEvent horizonSeries (mathematics)InformationMilitary baseService (economics)ForestRevision controlMixed realityProcess (computing)Software developerLecture/Conference
01:08
ForestNetwork topologyProduct (business)Multiplication sign
01:29
Computer-generated imageryAreaCASE <Informatik>DigitizingSpacetimeInstance (computer science)InformationAdditionSource codeForestObject (grammar)Field (computer science)Online helpoutputRight angleVideoconferencingDigital signalData managementTablet computerAndroid (robot)Network topologyMobile appGreatest elementLecture/ConferenceMeeting/InterviewVisualizationComputer animationProgram flowchart
04:07
Beta functionPoint cloudSymbol tableFront and back endsRevision controlMetropolitan area networkPoint (geometry)Profil (magazine)ForestLine (geometry)Uniform resource locatorService (economics)AlgorithmProcess (computing)Mathematical analysisTemplate (C++)Connected spacePhysical systemInternetworkingOpen sourceNetzwerkverwaltungExtension (kinesiology)Right angleField (computer science)Instance (computer science)Expert systemVirtual machineDecision theoryFunctional (mathematics)Cartesian coordinate systemAdditionAuditory maskingAttribute grammarTrailSet (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>Complete metric spaceLatent heatDatabasePlug-in (computing)OrthogonalitySoftware maintenanceCentralizer and normalizerCore dumpRotationPosition operatorRectangle2 (number)VideoconferencingQuaternion groupMobile appPower (physics)Multiplication signLimit (category theory)Ocean currentSoftwareComputer animationSoftwareLecture/Conference
12:00
ExplosionNetwork topologyBlock (periodic table)Field (computer science)Traffic reportingWindowProjective planeoutputCategory of beingAndroid (robot)Common Intermediate LanguageSlide ruleCASE <Informatik>Bit rateData managementEnterprise architectureProbability density functionField (computer science)Mobile appMessage passingEmailForestPoint (geometry)Letterpress printingOpen setComputer animationEngineering drawingMeeting/Interview
14:45
Level (video gaming)AreaAngleConstructor (object-oriented programming)Computer animation
15:51
Instance (computer science)Form (programming)Arithmetic meanUser interfaceStructural loadWeb pageComputer fileFormal languagePlug-in (computing)Office suiteVirtual machineSoftwareConfiguration spaceOpen sourceMessage passingChannel capacityEmailField (computer science)Attribute grammarDatabasePoint cloudConnected spaceInternetworkingTunisInternet service providerSinc functionProjective planeBlogCurveLevel (video gaming)Decision theoryModule (mathematics)Multiplication signAndroid (robot)Mobile WebInterface (computing)Tablet computerCartesian coordinate systemInstallation artPhysical systemSoftware developerSoftware frameworkElectronic mailing listCodeSlide ruleServer (computing)Axiom of choiceSoftware testingInformationBitSelf-organizationWeb 2.0GUI widgetLecture/ConferenceMeeting/Interview
23:31
Least squaresComputer-assisted translationComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:02
Actually, first off, I'm really happy that we were able to sponsor this great event and I would like to thank everybody who helps with sharing the sessions and making this a good event and doing all these services. Great job. Feels good to be here. So I will try to make a good mix between some basic information and some advanced information.
00:25
I know a lot of the faces in here already, some familiar faces who know what Qfield is quite precisely and I'll try to bring in some new information of what went on over the last couple of months, but on the other hand, I'll also try to cover some of the
00:41
bases right. So basically, I'll start with something completely different. Over the years of development in Qfield, we realized that there's quite a big demand in forestry overall, and so we decided that we would call all the Qfield version 3 series based on names of forests.
01:02
Also they play a quite important crucial role in climate biodiversity and so on. And annually over 15 billion trees are cut down, so that's over three times the size of Estonia, and that's each year going on like that. So I think that we are able to deliver a product that helps protect forests and helps to make
01:26
them grow, preserve them is really nice. Estonia is over half covered by forest, so we really need to take care of this. But we are not only here to talk, or I'm not only here to talk about forests, but
01:42
I'm here to tell you a story about Dennis, he's 42, and the forestry manager in Lahima, which is a national forest, a national forest here. Anyway, so one day when he was going out, he discovered that there was a beetle infestation
02:02
in his forests, and he was thinking what he could do about it, and how he could potentially stop these beetles spreading and endangering the forest. So one thing that is very, very important in this case is that you actually have a meticulous
02:21
documentation about what's going on, that you actually know what happens where, that you have a precise understanding of the current situation, because eventually this also means probably that you have to cut down some trees in some spaces, and if you choose the wrong spaces, you cut down trees, but you didn't even solve the problem.
02:40
So it's really important that you have a precise understanding of the situation you are faced with. So for that, Qfield offers a fieldwork app, which is for your mobile phones, for your tablets, Android, iOS, and so on, which allows you to digitize data in the field, collect data.
03:00
For instance, here we see pictures, that you can take pictures of any of the objects that you survey. You can also attach audio or video and much more information to your objects that you get in the field, that you collect in the field. So now I wonder if actually this, yeah, it does work, good, is it the correct one, right.
03:26
So there are also some efficient workflows that will help you in the field. So for instance, here what is possible is that you can actually track the areas, some areas. So you can start and just walk around or drive around an area, and this way digitize
03:47
exactly the area of the spread, go about it, and have it all as data in your centralized data sources. We can also see at the bottom that there are a lot of additional information available.
04:03
For instance, a lot of, for those of you who work with high precision GNSSs like PDOP and HDOP precision attributes, that will make it possible for you to assess the quality of the data later on.
04:20
It also comes with some quite advanced things. So I'll spare you the basics for today. What you can do is, for instance, you can have point clouds directly attached. So this one is a point cloud data set that is consumed over the air as a cloud-optimized point cloud. You can draw a line, and then you get, yeah, a profile.
04:41
Unfortunately, the video doesn't stop in the end, but it goes back to the beginning, which is a pity. But anyway, so that's quite some advanced things that are inside. This is all thanks to QGIS, which runs under the hood of this application, which means that we can expose a lot of QGIS functionality and make use of it.
05:00
But at the same time, what we also always try to do is to contribute back to QGIS. I've done a talk about that, I think 10 years ago, in Bonn at Phosphorgy. I don't know who was there, which was mostly under the label Qfield, QGIS first, kind of like always when you try to do things in Qfield, we try to make it as well in QGIS
05:23
and improve the whole ecosystem there. Now, this is something really nice, and it looks like this video doesn't start automatically. This is something new. There should be a new label, I think, on it, if this is the correct video.
05:41
If you know QGIS, and I guess you do. There is something called processing, and it is now possible to directly use processing algorithms in Qfield. So if you can, for instance, rotate your features, and I really love the live preview
06:00
of what's going on. You've seen before that there was this orthogonalize possibility. Cheer you out to the back of the room for sponsoring this functionality. Really nice. Basically, if you need your houses completely rectangular or with the right angles, that
06:22
can make it exactly the way you need it. What this means is obviously not only rectangular houses and rotation, but that means that we just unlocked a complete set of additional functionality in Qfields that you can use for whatever kind of analysis that you could want to do.
06:46
And we really hope that also this kind of incentivizes people that they would actually have new processing algorithms developed because they need them for Qfield. They will also be available in QGIS.
07:04
Right. We've seen that. We've definitely seen that. Something else which is new, for those of you who already know everything, is annotations. So if you take a picture, you can now live annotate it.
07:22
This is quite cool to just put the attention on some particular spots on a picture. What's also quite cool is that you can not only take photographies that you just took, but you can have templates around. Where this comes from is from underground network management, like sewage systems.
07:44
So they have some templates of manholes in the ground, and they would just then draw on top of that, like where are the inlets, where are the outlets, so they can directly in the field quickly annotate the situation in a graphical way, which is really nice. So that's in the newest version of Qfield now available.
08:06
And one more thing is, I know that's not a video, this is a really, really powerful new feature, plugins. We have now a plugin system in Qfield. In the past, we have often been asked by people for, could you please develop integrate
08:25
this functionality in Qfield, and we felt like, I can understand why you want it, but really I don't want it in Qfield core for edge cases, because this means that we have to maintain it for the upcoming, I don't know how many years, regardless if you still
08:41
need it or not, once it's in there, it somehow counts to the maintenance base. And with that kind of functionality of plugins, we finally are able to really have customer specific extensions to Qfield. Maybe just quickly, what is here, it's quite simple, it's this additional symbol here,
09:04
which is based on your location, it just tells you what weather you have to expect, so as long as Dennis is out there in the forest and the thunderstorm is coming, he will be prepared for the weather, for the temperature as well. We've also done something else, which we call Snap, I think it's Snap the name, which is
09:24
a plugin, quite often when you go out and you want to take pictures related to things, for those of you who have already done that, this means you take a point, you open the camera, you zoom around, you snap a picture, and then finally it will be out,
09:45
you have to accept the feature in the end, which is, I don't know, seven clicks or so, until you actually get a point at the current location with a picture, which is a regular thing to do and shouldn't take that many clicks. So we did another plugin that just allows you to have a camera button there, you click the camera button and within a couple
10:02
of seconds you have taken a picture at the current position, done. I guess you can imagine that this will open up quite a few new possibilities with specific use cases where you need to pre-fill attributes with some efficient data entry masks.
10:22
And I'm happy to say that you don't need to come to us to do plugins, you can just do them yourselves. And I have a couple of stickers with me here, a limited amount of them, not too many. So if you feel like writing a plugin, it's not so difficult. Some first participants
10:42
apparently have already one, do already have one. So it's not difficult to write a plugin, we have a booth over there, come by and show us your plugin or ask us how to do one. You can do anything, I think you could integrate some machine learning, that's what you should do in 2024, I'm pretty sure, or other fancy stuff. Anyway, last internet connection. If Teniz is
11:07
around in the forest, suddenly he doesn't have an internet connection, and I'm sure you all know the answer to that. We can also work offline with Qfield, thanks to a Qful cloud, which is a backend that we offer as a service, an app Qful cloud that helps you manage your teams
11:26
if you have multiple people out there to synchronize all the collected data into one central database. And you can easily track your things if you want, it's all open source, you can also host it on your own, but yeah, otherwise this is something that we offer as a
11:46
service as well. Obviously, as GIS experts, we love data, but users out there, decision makers,
12:02
they often don't directly want to have data. Instead, they like to have reports, so Teniz needed to send the mayor of the city a report, and he could use a QGIS print layout to prepare everything, and then collect the data and directly with the live collected data, prepare a PDF in
12:23
the field and send it by mail to the mayor, which he obviously found really nice and could work with. Yeah, so Qfield 3 Amazonia, meanwhile it's 3.3 Darien, is a digital public good,
12:45
which is United Nations approved, has won some award, best of Swiss apps in the enterprise category, with 1 million downloads, and actually that's wrong, it's not on Android and iOS and Windows, it's actually on Android, and on top of that there is iOS and Windows and
13:03
macOS and whatnot, which is quite a lot, quite good ratings, we're quite happy with what it is. Yeah, so finally, Teniz could save the forest, make everyone happy,
13:21
but obviously there is not just the Beatles, it's also about managing your data in general. Everybody was really happy, the mayor, because he got his PDF, was also very happy, so he decided to use Qfield much more on many other and new projects. Basically you can use it on,
13:44
I mentioned some examples of underground management and infrastructure management, there were examples of Qfield using it for mapping refugee camps, it is used by national surveying agencies in a country not so far north from here,
14:04
and there are many, many use cases, it's highly adaptable to your purpose. There is a slide, obligatory slide about us, Open GIS is the company behind it, and we do also consulting and help you, so in case you use Qfield and at some point you need
14:24
a professional support or you want to have a new feature integrated, we are very happy if you just send us a message about what you need, but also if you want you can also send us a message just about the cool project that you've done, and I don't know, send us a report and we'll be
14:41
happy to share it, to show the world what you can do with Qfield. Right, so there is actually much, much more that I could talk about for Qfield. I would still have five minutes, I will not use them, I'm afraid, so I'm looking forward to your questions later. And now we have actually, in the last months, we've done an enormous improvement on
15:07
many, many levels, like also construction tools are becoming better and better, there's like snapping support, there is a support for snapping to specific angles if you rotate something.
15:21
There is now also in the pipeline for soon geofencing, so basically that Dennis can get some alerts if he enters a protected area, that his phone will vibrate and tell him to get them out there as soon as possible, there are many things that are in there, but I think I'll just leave it at that and ask you to ask me questions, thank you.
15:53
So thank you, Matias, any questions? Thanks Matias, it was great, these new features,
16:01
I have one question regarding the cloud, for example, if you would like to use our cloud, how would be possible this connection, you know, taking serving the data with the Qfield, but not using the Qfield cloud, for example, in our company or in our country, we would like to use our cloud, how is this connection, is it possible and how is your support in this way?
16:26
Yes, this is possible, so Qfield cloud is an open source application available on GitHub, so basically you are free to just download and install it and run it on your machines
16:40
if you have the capacity to do so, so that's definitely possible, otherwise it's also possible that you ask us to run it for you, either we do it on one of the servers we know best, because we are quite efficient at running it in infrastructures we know, but we can also run it for you on your servers, so that's all possible, it's open source and available, just decide how.
17:10
Any other questions? Matias, you mentioned that Qfield is powered by QGIS engine, like you got the entire QGIS on the mobile phone, or how does it work? Yes, this is correct so far,
17:27
so if we rewind 15 years maybe, there was a Google Summer of Code, basically a development project to start with something called QGIS mobile, QGIS for Android, which was the first time that
17:43
QGIS could run on a tablet, that was really the complete QGIS, but it was quite obvious that with plenty of small buttons, this is not really something you want to use in the field, that's why we developed this new interface on top of it, the big advantage is still that the rendering,
18:05
the map appearance that you get is exactly the same, so if you configure something in QGIS for your map, it's the same on Qfield, if you configure your attribute forms for instance, it's also based on the QGIS configuration, so there's also a lot of, I think the advantage
18:22
for users is that you don't need to learn many new things, but actually the skill set that you learn when you use Qfield is also very very usable for QGIS, but yeah, basically it is a cross-compiled QGIS running on the machine. And you mentioned plugins, but you didn't mention
18:44
which language. Right, my bad, I should have. It is a bit different from the QGIS plugin system, what we use here is JavaScript for plugins, I don't know how many people now get encouraged or
19:03
discouraged from writing plugins. Anyway, the whole user interface of Qfield, like the shiny animated things and so on inside there, they are already based on JavaScript, which made it a logical choice because we already have a JavaScript framework,
19:24
and it's not based on, sorry if I'm a bit technical here, the widget system that QGIS uses, which is like buttons and so on, optimized for desktop systems, it's really more, if you think of it like a web page, HTML, where you also have buttons, but they don't look the same.
19:42
So really that's much more influenced from that side, so shipping a Python stack, not having the same QGIS ecosystem, not being able to also easily install Python modules from somewhere in there and so on, it would come with a couple of challenges to rely on Python,
20:03
it would also make the Qfield application, I don't know, increasing in size and so on, which meant a decision for JavaScript would be better integrated, but it comes with some learning curve, and we're currently working on an API documentation, and there are some plugins
20:20
that I mentioned there on GitHub, so if you want to get some experience, you can find them, and we've also written a blog post detailing some of the technical details to get started to make this easier to, I don't know, start from something that works and then fine-tune it to your needs. Any more questions from Dorians?
20:43
Last question on me, it's a little technical question, Mattias, is there any possibility to the post GIS layer with the internet connection to be updated in the field without using the cloud? Yes. How?
21:05
Since Qfield ships a QGIS inside, it also ships with the QGIS data providers, among them a Postgres data provider, so all you need to do is to get a QGIS project that connects to a Postgres database onto your device, you can either send that by email,
21:24
text message, whatever, download it as zip file, load it via USB cable onto your device, and even use Qfield cloud just as a means to transport the QGIS project file to your device in the end, it's live updated. If you have it like this, you don't get the offline capabilities,
21:54
so if you know that you always have 5G network coverage, Wi-Fi, whatever, then it's completely
22:00
fine to just, like in your office, work on a Postgres connection. As soon as the network gets unstable, things tend to be more difficult, so you really want to think well and test well before you do that, but it is possible there are people who do that, yeah. Yeah, we've got a couple of minutes, so I've got one final question. Could you scroll one slide back?
22:27
It's, yeah, so looking at like a list of sponsors and organizers, there's one weird thing that stands out, like maybe you do know the story behind the logo of Qfield cloud?
22:45
Tough question, tough question. I signed an NDA that I won't disclose this information. No, we actually had a couple of years back, we decided to go with bees as our mascot
23:04
for the company. We did a big, I don't know if some of you have seen QGIS on the road, which was a story that we told about beekeeping back in the days, and ever since we never got away from that topic, so yeah, some say it's an ant, some say it's a bee. The name is Newquay
23:21
at least, so if you see Newquay somewhere, say hi. Okay, thank you Mathias.