I have been very interested in QGIS with the short name Quantum GIS, which I have known about its existence for several years. Based on the idea that it would be useful to share the information I gained from this close interest, and because there are not many significant resources in Turkish about the software, I decided to start the series of articles on the use of QGIS with this introductory article.
QGIS is an open source geographic information system software. Many of us may view open source software as free software, but given the insight and the work behind it, a rational thinking person will realize that this is not the case. In addition, many of us defend the thesis that open source software is more unsuccessful than commercial software. I think this attribution of success or failure is a matter of how we look at the event. As a result, I think it must be a great success to produce elite software in such a large market without any financial expectation (some software may have small advertising revenues), and even to produce software that is known to produce outstanding software.
With the current 1.7.3 Wroclaw version of QGIS, it is very stable in terms of giving users what they want. If we talk about it without going into details for now;
- Ability to work on Linux and Windows operating systems,
- Support Esri Shape, Map Info Tab and many other file types,
- Ability to keep spatial data in PostgreSQL database via Postgis,
- Creating and querying attribute tables,
- Vector editing,
- Coordinate system definition and many coordinate systems defined by EPSG (european petroleum survey group),
- Labeling objects,
- Digitizing raster data,
- Ability to work with WMS and WFS layers,
- Wide plugin support,
- Ability to analyze (for example, nearest neighbor)…
have such abilities.
As it seems, the QGIS software, which has many functions, already has many capabilities that other commercial GIS software, which costs quite a lot, already has. If you think that there is a software that will meet your needs in terms of its capabilities, why waste your money for nothing?
If you are interested in QGIS software, you can visit the software’s website here, download the software for free here, and download the software’s user manual from here.
With this article, we have made a small introduction to QGIS software. In the coming days, I plan to make a few applications for the use of QGIS. I hope this and the following articles will be useful…
Posted: by Hakan KOCAMAN
