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Professional field data management with QField

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Professional field data management with QField
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PostGIS represents the de-facto standard for managing your spatial data, while QField is the state-of-the-art application for their management in the field. Since QField 2.0 release in spring 22, the seamless data synchronisation experience is complete. QFieldCloud closes the loop between your company's fieldworkers and the GIS analysts. In this talk, we'll share _features_, _best practices_ and _pro-tips_ for managing your projects, remote teams, and permissions in a professional setting. ## About QField QField is an open-source app developed for efficient fieldwork in real-time in urban areas, with a 5G connection or with offline data. The mobile GIS app combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to conveniently bring data from the field to the office. Seamless QGIS integration, GPS-centred, offline functionality, synchronisation capabilities, desktop configurable: “QField” is designed for fieldwork – simple but uncompromising. Link: qfield.org ## About QFieldCloud QFieldCloud is a spatial cloud service integrated into “QField” that allows remote provisioning and synchronisation of geodata and projects. Although “QFieldCloud” is still in an advanced beta stage, it is already being used by many groups to improve their workflows significantly. Link: qfield.cloud
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
So, today's presentation I'll try to talk to you a little bit about how Qfield can be used in a professional setting. I will give you a little bit of hints of what can be done, what should be done, what should not be done, but I also would like to show you some of the most powerful
features that we have in recent version of Qfield, so that you actually see that in action. As I said, I work and I founded OpenJS.ch, which are the main drivers behind Qfield. We are the company that's actively developing it, but
I'm not here to talk about that. I'm Marco Bernazzocchi and let's start it. Why Qfield at all? Because when you're in the field you need to be efficient, you want your people to be as effective as possible. It might be raining, it might
be windy, it might be cold, they might be hungry and you want them to have the best experience possible so that they get you fantastic data and that is something that Qfield was built from the beginning with that in mind. When we decide if to put a new button in Qfield, we have big discussions if that
button has the right to be there or not and if it suits a purpose or not. As I said, you might be in that situation, you might be the GIS analyst in the office which has perfect temperature, comfy chair and is doing
all the work in an easy setting, but your people out there will in certain cases not be in a perfect situation. Always remember when you are the person setting up those projects, there are a couple of points that are crucial to
having a successful experience on the field and that is not only with Qfield, that applies to any field mapping software that you might be using. So the first thing that you need to think about is to optimise your project. That means it might be that your QGIS project that you are using
has 20, 30 attributes per layer because that makes sense for that layer. But here is where you need to go and ask yourself the question which one of those attributes are the ones that actually need people on the field to be digitising? Which of these attributes are the ones where
being on the field actually brings an extra value to my project and my data? That's your very first question that you need to ask yourself at any point you are preparing a project for a field survey. And what you do here
is you focus, you try to reduce, you try to kick away things that are not important, you hide them off and then specifically in Qfield, but I'm sure that other tools can do that as well, you separate things. Give them a way to look at, like in this case of the picture,
you see generic informations and then pictures, issues, reviews. If somebody is not taking pictures, it's not going to go to the issues section. So you're going to make their life much, much easier. And then configure your project properly. If you want them to input a number,
or give them the chance to input a number easily, if you want them to choose between some values, do that work for them. So always, always think about the poor guys that are out there in the rain and in the cold and they are digitising data for you and you want them to
digitise as good as possible. Simplify. Beside configuring the ideal widget, you really need to think, what can you kick away? Simple forms are key.
Use default values. Don't make somebody type today's date and digitisation time, every time they are out there, they're going to hate you. There are tools that in Qfield, you can just set default now, whenever they digitise something, there's going to be a date,
a time, it's going to be there. If they want to change it, they can still change it, because maybe they had a coffee and the data was actually captured 10 minutes earlier. That's no problem. But don't make them do work that is not mandatory. So if you can have a machine to work for you, let it do it.
And in Qfield, you have the chance to be able to set default values, which are very complex, because you can use all the power of QGIS expressions as default values, so you can go beside having dates and time. That's just a clear candidate for that, is the date of the digitisation.
Set constraints. That's another big, big thing. If you have people that should be digitising something, allow them to not make mistakes by helping them and by telling them, look, you're telling me that you have 100,000 boxes of bees.
Maybe you did a mistake in typing. Maybe that's out of the amount of bees that we are looking for. Or we have, I don't know, three and a half cars. What happened to that half car? I mean, maybe it's a legitimate case,
and that is where you can work with heart constraints, which are the red ones in Qfield. You can set a constraint to be mandated, so if you set a constraint to be mandatory, you're not gonna be able to digitise data unless you fix the issue. Or the lower one, which you can see down
in the amount of bees, the yellow ones, those are constraints that are suggestions. For example, the amount of bees in this case here is null, and we are suggesting our surveyors not to do that. But if they think, well, it is null, and it has to be null, then they can go on
and save their data. These are kind of very generic thing, but those will save you probably 80%, or they will save your people in 80% of the situation.
Another point that I didn't mention here that is very good for a specific case of trying to avoid data conflicts is to manage your people well. If you can, send them in different places. It's just gonna be so much easier managing the data after because you will not have two people digitising
in the same place and potentially creating conflict. So if you have the chance to do that on a, more on a social contract level, where you say you go to the southern part of Florence, you go to the northern part of Florence, and you do digitising this way, it's gonna save you a lot of headache. Obviously, it's not always the case that you can do that,
but when you can, do that. That's a very easy way to avoid conflicts. And then use powerful features. And here I'm gonna show you a little bit of the features that we have in Q-Field that can make your professional surveying way
much, much easier. So one of the latest things we had is navigation. The navigation you're seeing here is the most complex navigation we have, and that is actually navigation to vertices of polygons. So you can see that I can choose
to which vertex of the polygon I want to navigate, and it will automatically give me a trace to that point. The first, when I turn it on at first, it shows me the centroid of the building, and then I can say, well, no, I actually want the second vertex, and then I can just move around to the right,
to the left with the arrows, and change different vertices on that polygon. That means that when you have polygons, you can just say, I need to go to the northernmost point there, and it will navigate you. It doesn't do route navigation or routing. It's basically just telling you where to go,
what azimuth, what distance, and so on. Navigation has been added across the board in Q-Field. You have it in the search bar. You can put in coordinate and say navigate to there. You have navigation to features. Sorry, to polygons, you have navigation to features.
So in plenty of places, we added navigation. Then when you're using professional GNSS receivers, something that is very often done is that you don't just take the point at a certain moment,
but you take an average of a point. So you stay in a place for three minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever you need to, and Q-Field will keep on getting the points until we get to the minimum number of positions collected,
which we can set here. In this case, we are setting to six. So Q-Field will try, as soon as we click on the plus button on the right side, we'll start collecting the location data, and you'll see at the top of the location, there is a bar moving. It's telling me, good, now we have six points,
and now Q-Field is averaging your position and using that as coordinates for the pond that you're digitizing. That means that you can easily leave a GNSS receiver somewhere, do a thousand iteration of this, and as soon as you have thousand iteration, Q-Field will average those
and will save those to your point layer. Staying on the external GNSSs, we added everything for that. We have support for your Leica, Trimble, whatever.
We have plenty of devices downstairs in our booth. You can come and have a look. You can do sub-centimeter. You can actually do millimeter precision with Q-Field. It's not Q-Field that is saying if the precision comes or not, it's your device. Q-Field just deals with it and can save that.
It can save your dilution values. It can save your accuracy, and that's it. Basically, you have all this kind of thing. As long as your GNSS device is streaming information over Bluetooth, then you're good.
Then we added a stakeout view, a precise view. That's something that is used in the navigation mode. You can say as soon as I'm closer than five meters or 10 meters that the menu you saw there, the view will change, and it will show you this precise location view that is used, for example,
when you need to go to a certain specific point. Maybe you have the coordinates of a cable that was buried, and you want to go there. You're putting your coordinates. You navigate to those, set that you want the stakeout precise view, and as soon as you get into a radius of a certain amount of meters to that point, it will change to the new view.
It will give you the azimuth, and it will actually show your point of yourself getting close to your target, so a pretty neat way to navigate to your points. Queue code, that's actually something that's coming in version 2.3, so in the next release.
Well, I don't think I have to explain too much what they are and what they are useful for, but they will be in queue field. Basically, you can use them anywhere where you're inputting text, so in the search, so you can, for example, have your assets with a cure code. You can get there, you scan the cure code, and it will search the text
that the cure code is giving back into your data, so you can immediately find, for example, an ID of a certain asset that you placed somewhere, and that will make much, much more efficient looking for things for your people out there. Then animated markers.
In this demo project, this is very playful, but the idea of bringing animation on a map on a mobile could be something that really could help to draw attention. I wouldn't overuse it because it will just become playful and distract people, but in some specific case,
an animation could be something that's really helpful to focus your attention of your users, or to get the attention of your users, not to focus them. Then live default values is another little neat thing
that you can configure that basically connects different fields in a form together. Here, you can see if I change the seed number, or if I change the name of the seed,
all the data related to that are updated, so you see that the moonshine, or the mischief, pumpkin, sorry, the picture are changing, so you could have your data linked from an external table and being loaded up, depending on what you're choosing,
so you can actually have your forms being dynamic there. Spatial bookmarks, that's also something that's super useful. If you keep on going at same places, you keep on having the same extent, same zoom, et cetera,
you can set a spatial bookmark, and you can use it and reuse it all the time, so that's something that really increases the speed of work from people. Atlas Print, maybe you know it from QGIS, you can print plenty of things in Qfield,
you can also say make a selection of different, you can select different polygons, and say generate an Atlas Print out of this, so you could, if you're in the field, select whatever you worked on, create an Atlas and send it by email back to the office, and they can already start working
on whatever you generated that very day, so that's very, very powerful, and it's something that integrates well with multi-selection, where you can also select multiple things and change in one go, one attribute, for example, change the date or something like that everywhere.
Temporal filtering, that's also something very useful if you have a lot of data that have a timestamp on it, you can filter whatever you see on the map on a temporal basis, so you can go and say, well, I only need to see the data that were digitized in the last week, for example, that you can do in the field, you wanna see your assets on the field
that are very recent or very, very old, so in the field, you can dynamically react to those kind of things as well. We support OAuth protected web services, so you can integrate easily into your services that are protected,
and then we have all the part about management of the users, that's more on the Q field cloud part, I'm gonna have a talk at 5.15 today afternoon, more on the Q field part, but here, just quickly, if you're using that, the important thing here, you have this concept of organizations, where you can say, well, these are member of the organization,
they can do that in the organization, they're admin or they are members, and then at the next level, we have teams, where you can say, well, the team, Florence East, and the team, Florence West, and certain members are part of one team or the other, and then within the project itself, you can set collaborators, you can say,
well, Marco is a collaborator, and team Florence West is a collaborator, and they have different rights, and there we have five different levels, going from read-only to reporter, which can only generate new data, to editor and manager, which can also delete data, and these are then settings that are automatically set in Q field as well,
so it's not that you just get an error, you're not allowed to do this, but you actually cannot do it ahead, because Q field will react in the user interface. We support PG services, which is also something used a lot in enterprise world. You can obviously, but this will go on much more
in the other presentation, attribute change, whatever, like tracking, whatever was changed. Here you can see we passed from false to true, so we have a conflict management as well, where you can say, well, apply this, or do not apply that. Yes, so that's the status as of today.
What's next? This morning I got a very exciting email from a fruit brand that told us that we can click on a button, and we are out of test flight, and we can have Q field also on iOS,
but that's not official news at all, I'm just telling you in secret here, so Q field 2.3 is gonna be available as well on the App Store. Then we're doing, well, some of the things you saw are gonna come in 2.3. We are doing a lot of work in very different areas.
If you are interested in more of that, we have a booth downstairs, we have plenty of templates there, we can show you things. There are the developers, I don't develop much anymore there, so come down, we can show you around what things are there. And, oops, wrong computer.
Obviously, Q field is an open source project. Open GIS is putting a lot of effort in it, a lot of time in it. There are plenty of support, plenty of companies that have helped us with donation, with sponsoring, with paid feature development. That's the very same model that QGIS has.
That's how we found the development of Q field, so please, if you can, help us find the work. Thank you very much. Thanks.