QGIS and FOSS GIS Wishlist for 2016

Happy holidays! I am certainly thankful for QGIS this year as it showed significant improvements to its capabilities and the user experience.  Many other free and open source GIS projects also improved including a major update of GRASS GIS and gvSIG graduating from incubation. In addition, SaTScan continues to get easier to use while providing advanced spatio-temporal statistics. GeoDA has reached nearly 150,000 downloads, and LAStools continues to rock!

Thanks to QGIS and  ALL FOSS GIS Developers!

I wanted to take a moment to talk about my QGIS wishlist for 2016.  In the coming year, I hope to get more involved...I am aiming for trying to create some plugins. You can checkout the QGIS roadmap and submit requests for new features at: http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis/roadmap.

What are your wishes for QGIS in 2016?  Feel free to leave them in comment section below!

Of course, the core QGIS developers are always hard at work, and some of these may not be scheduled for the near or future release, but it is always good to dream! These are on the advanced feature end, and although not critical, would be nice to have.

My QGIS wishlist for 2016:

• Continued commitment to cartography (definitely happening)
• Full-funding goals reached for crowdsourced QGIS plugins and projects.
• More maps in the QGIS Flickr Showcase (Do your part!)
• Continued improvements to the Print Composer
• Error-free or near-error free releases of QGIS. 
• I worry as more features are added, more bugs could creep in!
• Ability to join points to lines - visualizing data by street segments can be extremely cool!
• More spatial analysis tools integrated directly into QGIS core
• Might include linear directional mean, standard distance, or others...
• Ability to create an address locator from reference data
• Online locators have limitations (number of records that can be (batch) geocoded) and can't be used for confidential data

Some other/non-QGIS wishes

• Open routing and isochrone maps for the US (See also: http://openrouteservice.org/)
• Some new and exciting projects!  Revival of old favorites?

How to contribute
Lastly, there are many ways to contribute to QGIS: http://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/index.html. Also, if you use QGIS, whether for school, business, government, or non-profit, please consider a donation!  https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/donations.html

Businesses Based on Open Source GIS

Businesses based on free and open source GIS software (FOSS GIS) offer a number of opportunities to owners and clients alike.  Like Red Hat and Linux, these companies offer several services using FOSS GIS.  At least two have their own suite or development tools (Boundless OpenGeo Suite and Cartologic's Cartoview).  These services include: consulting, development, training (sometimes certification/testing), and support.

Of course, these businesses also offer job opportunities 

for those interested in FOSS GIS! 

In today's post, we will look at a sample of companies out there, where they are based, their philosophy, and specific areas of interest.  All businesses that I reviewed offer sample or demo web maps and apps on their websites.  Although the companies are based around the world, they all offer services to clients whether near or far.

New York-based Boundless is the biggest company out there with 45 employees and venture capital financing.  It has its own suite of software OpenGeo Suite and emphasizes interoperability of different combinations of open and paid-software.  Boundless has a big list of big name clients across different sectors.



This same philosophy that GIS tools can come from different realms is also shared by Cartologic based on Giza, Egypt.  They are a team of geospatial IT developers and focus on Business Integration, GIS Mobile Applications, and GeoPortals.  Cartologic offers the free Cartoview an open source web platform for publishing maps.  (I will cover Cartoview in a later post.)

Many businesses recognize that a client's needs
can be met in more than one way, as this diagram
from Cartologic illustrates.

South Africa-based Kartoza was formed as a merger between Linfiniti Consulting (Tim Sutton) and Afrispatial in 2014. Kartoza's key business areas are: Training and Education, Deployment and Support, and Software Development. Kartoza is also a Boundless partner for Southern Africa.

The UK-based Lutra Consulting specializes in flood risk.  Like many of these, businesses, they have given back to the open source community--especially through the creation of QGIS plugins, like AutoTrace.  They are currently crowd funding for AutoTrace 2.

gvSIG Association (SIG is Spanish for GIS or un sistema de informacion geografica).  gvSIG moved from a DOT.org to a DOT.com.  It is located in Valencia, Spain and  is based off of the free desktop and mobile platforms of gvSIG.

The Association raises a new business model around Free Software democratic values, 

based on cooperation and shared knowledge, where part of the generated benefit 

reverts on the strengthening of the gvSIG project. 

NaturalGIS, based in Evora, Portugal, utilizes QGIS and PostGIS/PostgreSQL features services including:  Consulting, Web Development, Training, Data Analysis, Support, and Development.

Many businesses, like NaturalGIS, use QGIS as the go-to replacement for ArcGIS.

Businesses that offer commercial support for QGIS:
http://www2.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/commercial_support.html

Contact me
If you are a business based on open source GIS software, I want to hear more about you!  Please leave a link and a little about you in the comment section below.  I am thinking about compiling a list of different companies.