Liberate your QGIS projects out of office with Mergin Maps
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| Number of Parts | 351 | |
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/69088 (DOI) | |
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| Production Year | 2022 |
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00:00
Office suiteMobile WebMotion captureGraphics tabletProduct (business)Mobile appPoint cloudGraph coloringArchaeological field surveyOpen sourceInformation technology consultingGoodness of fitUniverse (mathematics)Texture mappingProjective planeWave packetHuman migrationCartesian coordinate systemMultiplication signExpert systemData storage deviceMappingRouter (computing)Quaternion groupoutputSoftware developerPolygon meshPresentation of a groupField (computer science)GoogolCore dumpXMLComputer animation
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Source codeDisintegrationTrailArray data structureComputer fileShape (magazine)Raster graphicsMobile WebConnectivity (graph theory)Closed setRange (statistics)Repository (publishing)File formatLibrary (computing)MathematicsServer (computing)INTEGRALArchaeological field surveyTrailQuaternion groupTransformation (genetics)Projective planeTexture mappingOpen sourcePlug-in (computing)Mobile WebCore dumpForm (programming)CodeUMLComputer animation
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GeometryArchaeological field surveyNetwork topologyStructural equation modelingMedical imagingField (computer science)Projective planePhysical systemForm (programming)Theory of relativityMenu (computing)Wave packetComputing platformVideoconferencingComputer animation
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Web browserVolumeData typeServer (computing)Array data structureProxy serverGoogolVolumenvisualisierungINTEGRALProcess (computing)Projective planeServer (computing)Computer animation
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Data storage deviceoutputSoftware testingComputer fileMathematicsAttribute grammarArithmetic progressionPhysical systemProjective planeServer (computing)CASE <Informatik>Mathematical analysisComputer animation
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Mathematical analysisDistribution (mathematics)Regular graphArchaeological field surveyOffice suiteObservational studyOffice suiteQuaternion groupField (computer science)SynchronizationTraffic reportingMappingCASE <Informatik>Self-organizationReal numberMathematical analysisTexture mappingComputer animation
05:47
Client (computing)Server (computing)outputPlug-in (computing)NewsletterRevision controlEmailPay televisionMultitier architectureFreewareData storage devicePoint (geometry)Archaeological field surveyObject-oriented analysis and designConvex hullVideo projectorTraffic reportingInterior (topology)Field (computer science)SynchronizationTexture mappingDatabaseMathematicsBackupProjective planeHeegaard splittingMultiplication signElectronic mailing listSynchronizationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Attribute grammarPlug-in (computing)Field (computer science)Revision controlData structureServer (computing)Archaeological field surveyClient (computing)Point (geometry)Software developerTable (information)Line (geometry)Traffic reportingDigital photographyValidity (statistics)Moment (mathematics)NewsletterWeb 2.0Point cloudLibrary (computing)outputDiscounts and allowancesData managementDifferenz <Mathematik>Cartesian coordinate systemQuaternion groupProduct (business)INTEGRALComputer fileGeometryData storage deviceMappingPhysical systemDirection (geometry)HypermediaOffice suiteSpeciesComputer animationXMLUMLEngineering drawingDiagram
11:40
Advanced Encryption StandardProjective planeComputer hardwareoutputMoment (mathematics)Uniform resource locatorAndroid (robot)
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DistanceOperations support systemField (computer science)SynchronizationComputer-generated imageryHypermediaRevision controlServer (computing)BackupComputer fileBitStability theoryPhysical systemTexture mappingPoint (geometry)Revision controlMultiplication signData storage deviceProjective planeField (computer science)Type theoryTable (information)Link (knot theory)Server (computing)Digital photographySynchronizationTask (computing)InformationHypermediaComputer fileWeb 2.0Attribute grammarDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Office suiteAsynchronous Transfer ModeMedical imagingProduct (business)Scaling (geometry)Ferry CorstenSoftware bugMappingLattice (order)Computer animationXMLUML
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:01
Hi, welcome to my presentation. I'm really glad to see you all here. As Kurt said already, I am Peter Petric from, based in Itomisho, Czech Republic, and I'm QGIS core developer, mostly mesh layers, 3D and other stuff. I'm from Gutra Consulting. We are based
00:24
in UK but have a distributed workspace all over the Europe. We are 10 years of QGIS contributions to QGIS 3D point clouds and mesh layers. Sabir has a presentation on mesh layers following me and Martin about 3D. We do migration to open source support and
00:41
training, and of course, we provide merging maps, product, and cloud. So what is merging maps? You may know it, formerly it was input app and merging two products, and we tried to rebrand it last year. It was not that easy as I thought. It's very
01:03
difficult to rebrand, and the most difficult is pickle color. So we pickle color, that's good, and now we are called merging maps, and I'm very glad that I talked with many of you I see in our stand below. Why it is so popular? Because we have many people
01:21
teaching merging maps in their universities because it's very simple. It requires, the application requires no training, and at the same time, it's everything you need for field survey, and you don't need GIS experts to do your field survey. You just need someone who is really good at QGIS to set up a project, but the app is very, very
01:42
simple. And it's very popular at universities because where else you can play with your mobile, and teacher will not be afraid because it's mobile app. So you can have it on App Store or Google Play, so if you get bored, scan it and you can play with it. I
02:01
think it's very simple. What is the merging maps? It's a whole ecosystem based on your field surveys. It also has a component to track and store your data on the cloud, or on your self-deployment of a server. It also does versioning and history and
02:23
tracking of the changes, like who did which change on your project. It has a very close integration with QGIS. We can even say it's like based on QGIS. It's really running QGIS on your mobile. So it's not like integration, it's like really QGIS on your mobile. And it has a very nice plugin, so it should work everything smoothly from
02:43
your QGIS. And it's all full open source. You can scan the GitHub for merging maps, GitHub repository, like all code is mostly MIT or AGPL or GPL. So what are the big benefits of the system? First of all, it has the same QGIS core library as you
03:05
run on desktop. So if your project looks somehow on a desktop, it looks the same on a mobile. So you don't need to do some transformation of your styles and
03:20
everything like that. It supports a very much range of formats similar to your desktop. It has very powerful forms. You see the relations, gallery of images, all possible videos you can imagine that you can set up in QGIS. And they are very intuitive. So as I said, in your field, you don't need to worry that your
03:44
surveyors need some training. On the left, we see how to share the project. So you have a menu similar to what you are used to with other sharing platforms like Google Drive. You can share your project with your colleagues or your team, or you can
04:02
explore some projects. So it's a very easy permission system where you can set up who can read or who can write to your project or who can see it. This is a picture of how it looks in QGIS. You will have a processing toolbox, the toolbox at the top, and then also browser integration. Again, you see your project, your
04:26
project is shared with you, and exploration. This is how the server looks like. And you can see that it tracks the changes of your project. And if you go through the menus, you will see who did the change, when, which features were changed, and
04:45
which attributes were changed. So it's kind of nice to use it for tracking progress of your project or analysis if everything goes well. It has a permission system, as I mentioned, so you can set up all this stuff. We are doing some case studies,
05:03
and it's very popular also in nonprofit organizations. This is a case study from Fauna and Flora, done in Vietnam, and they were monitoring a given population, which is one of the most threatened experiments in the world, and they have two teams of six to nine members going twice per month in a field, completely offline
05:24
in jungle, and then they go back to the office, synchronize everything merged together automatically, and in the office they can proceed in QGIS, use QGIS analysis tool to produce reports, analyze this, and do the research. So you see a real-world example of how merging is used, merging maps is used in the field.
05:48
Okay, so what else is in this ecosystem? First of all, we have integrations, like if you have PostGIS, that we have various tools like DbSync that can synchronize your merging maps project with your PostGIS database. So it's both
06:05
directions, so you can still have your final data in PostGIS and use merging maps. We have MediaSync, which allows you to automatically transfer photos from merging maps to your drive, for example, S3 bucket, and empty your photos or backup your photos to place where you want to see them. We have other tools,
06:24
we have C++ and Python client, so many other clients use this Python client to create some extra validations or extra steps in their workflows and produce, for example, web maps. What's the backbone of the whole system? The
06:44
backbone is the MIT C++ library geodiff. It's the same as a library diff or tool diff on a Linux, if you know it, but it's for geopackages and Postgres databases. So you see here that you have one base original file, you have two surveyors in the field, and both, one of them changed the
07:03
attribute of a species, other one changed the age, and both of them add a point. The geodiff can automatically detect these changes, and when you are back in the office and sync, it can change the final table, so it's merged together automatically. And it works very nice if
07:22
you don't change the structure of the tables. So, and it's also tracked in the history, as we've seen before. What about the community? We have a Slack channel that we started, I think, half a year ago, and now we have 500 people there, talking about how they use
07:42
merging maps, asking questions directly to developers and sharing their experience. We have also a newsletter machine, we send every month updates in the product, and to imagine the size of our cloud, we run, it's 50,000 QG projects that are hosted at the moment. We are two years in full production,
08:04
we have, like, last eight months, we have eight input releases, nine plugin releases, 11 server releases, and we have something like six full-time people, seven full-time people working on these projects exclusively.
08:21
I'm talking about the cloud solution, you can either deploy your own solution on your servers, or you can use our deployment that is free for personal use, and for academic use, and we have high discounts for non-commercial projects, and for commercial
08:40
projects, the price is not perceived, but for storage. So it's kind of affordable for commercial projects, too, if you don't want to handle on your server. Okay, so what about the features? Okay, so what features we developed in the last few months?
09:04
Okay, so first of all, I want to say something about the plugin updates. The users had a problem that when they synchronized to the field that something is not working. So we created a lot of validations
09:22
for you, so when you click sync button in your QGs, it will show you all the warnings we found on your projects, and they will allow you to go directly to documentation, understand the problem, or fix it. So when there are no warnings, you are sure that the project will work on your mobile, so
09:42
there are no problems. Also, it shows you the changes that you did on your project. This is also a change in the plugin that Alexander
10:01
developed, and it's a list of the changes. So similarly, as you've seen on the web, here in the plugin, you can do a difference between various versions of your project, and you can visually see what changed on the map and also in the attribute table. The green lines were added,
10:21
the red one was deleted, and the yellow one was modified attribute. So you can also do some reports for your managers or for someone who is auditing the survey, who did which changes. Now we have some recent work on application.
10:43
For example, we added the possibility of splitting of the data, snapping, which was also caused by people in the field that they want to snap to electric poles, for example. And also this one, which
11:02
I'm really proud of, is AutoSync, which means that you can set up in your project that any time there is any change in your project, it will automatically send the data to the server. So this was requested by some users that wanted to make sure that people will not forget
11:21
to synchronize back in the office. They said, okay, if the survey will change the project, we won't automatically send it to the server, so we have a new version. So this is the AutoSync feature. And also it has a nice button now on the canvas where you can immediately synchronize your project.
11:42
Also we worked a lot on external GPS, so we have support for most of the external GPS hardware at the moment. And also you have GPS panel where you can see all the data from your external GPS. For Android it works natively, so you can select your
12:00
Bluetooth GPS external antenna directly in the phone. For iOS you need to have a mock location, but also it works. Connecting this external GPS, we also added a stakeout, both for long mode for navigation to the point on the map, and also when you have external GPS, you can directly precisely stakeout
12:25
your point on the map, so you know it's the same point as last time, for example. I want to talk a bit about very common questions about this Merging Maps solution, and it's how to handle pictures. Because when you are in the
12:46
office, you have to select your surveyors. So we have thought about this problem and developed a few ways how to make your life easy in the office. One way is selective synchronization, which means that the surveyors will not fetch the data of other surveyors.
13:01
So you will only take your pictures sent to the server, but not get the pictures of others to your phone. The other one is Mediasync, I already mentioned that one, where you can take the photos from Merging Maps server and put it on S3 bucket or Google Drive or some other storage type, so it doesn't fill up your Merging Maps storage. Then there is
13:21
an automatic resizing of images that you can now set up in a plugin, and when the surveyor takes a photo, it automatically scales down. Then we have Image Gallery, where you can link multiple pictures to one feature, and also we can extract the exit information from the pictures to store it in the attribute table.
13:43
We did tons of work that is not visible, but I want to mention it, because we spent a lot of time during the last half year to improve robustness and stability, mostly because we had a project, we had hundreds of files, and also thousands of versions. So we're trying to make the system so robust
14:03
that it can handle any big project, any versions, and also working on syncing of large files and all these exceptionally big production projects that you can imagine that if someone is using it, it happens.
14:21
I want to talk about new features, about roadmap. First of all, we will have very soon, very soon new community edition release that will have all the work from last year, tons of bug fixes for Merging Maps community edition, and we
14:40
decided to switch to workspaces, which is another big task, which will help you a lot when you evaluate the Merging Maps and want to invite the rest of your team. So it will be a lot easier to invite your colleagues to your project, to rework the stuff.
15:02
Also, we are working on map overviews, background maps, flexible permissions, so for example you can only use this to edit data in the field, and not in the QGs, public web maps, and we try to move to different packaging systems. Thank you very much for listening to me.
15:25
Join our chat, and there is a link if you want, and I am open to questions. Thank you.