QGIS Gauteng user group meeting – 31 March 2017

QGIS Gauteng user group meeting – 31 March 2017 – CSIR Meraka Building

Twelve people from the GIS community attended the second Gauteng meeting of the QGIS South Africa user group (four had left by the time we took the photos).

The meeting was opened by Gerhard Brits around 10:00 who asked everyone present to introduce themselves by stating their name, where they are from and how they use QGIS. From this introduction it came out that most of the people are not yet using QGIS as their main GIS software, but want to move to QGIS as it is quite stable now and provides all the same features as proprietary GIS software. This lead to a brief discussion by Gerhard about making QGIS the training software at university level and how difficult it is for a big institution/company to move from the GIS software they know to QGIS.

Immo Blecher chaired the meeting and welcomed everyone present.

Technical Talk by Gavin Fleming: QGIS 3

QGIS 3 will see a few improvements from 2.X which will make it more stable and less resource intensive. QGIS 3 will see an update from QT4 to Qt5, an update from Python2.7 to Python3 and a number of updates/improvements in the user interface. Some improvements include multiple canvases, enhancements to the layer panel and enhancements to the processing and cartography tools.

Tea break (Thanks to WMS for sponsoring the tea break)

Technical talk by Immo Blecher: Using MySQL and MariaDB to import data into QGIS

Immo demonstrated how to create a database using HeidiSQL. After that he demonstrated how to import data into QGIS using the MySQL/MariaDB importer plugin. This process can be used to import spatial data into a database and then use QGIS to visualise and work with the data.

After the technical talks we had a question and answer session where people asked general QGIS related questions and answers and solutions where discussed.

The meeting closed around 14:00.

On a general note, here is a link to a free online tutorial, from the Baruch College of the City University of New York, for someone who has no/very little experience in QGIS.

https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/confluence/display/geoportal/GIS+Practicum

Thanks to Christo Gouws for taking these notes.