Quantum GIS

This is the third in a our series of interviews with QGIS developers and users. Today we travel to the Netherlands to meet Steven Ottens (known as stvn on IRC). The interview was conducted by Tim Sutton and Gary Sherman over Internet Relay Chat.

TS:Steven, can we ask you just to briefly introduce yourself?

My name is Steven M. Ottens and I'm 26 right now. I live in Wageningen, the Netherlands and I'm trying very hard to finish my study there. My official study is boring so I'm now doing GIS/Geovisualisation instead.

I'm living in an old house in the town centre with 3 other students and our cat. Well actually he's not our cat since he belongs to the house so we're more his servants than he's our cat - but he's a wonderful master.

GS: How did you become aware of QGIS?

I'm currently doing a thesis and since the faculty couldn't give me a good computer I brought along my own (actually my parents) laptop. Having my own laptop provided me with a choice between linux and windows. I chose linux for various reasons and went searching for GIS software. After doing some googling I found qgis.

TS: You recently spent some time looking at freedesktop.org compliance for QGIS? What prompted you to do this, what problems did you encounter and what is the current state of this work?

The new fd.o standard on how menu's should behave is currently being implemented into gnome. This is quite an overhaul and many programs run the risk to drop out of the standard menus. On the other hand this is the change to get 'kde-apps' into 'gnome-menus' and vice versa. Since I use qgis a lot I wanted it into my menu and went looking for ways how to do it. But the new fd.o standard also meant that the old way of editing menu's didn't work and a new one was not yet designed, so had to look deeper into the matter and finally landed on the fd.o site. Seeing that it didn't involve much programming I decided I might be able to help qgis in this. But it was easier said than done, the standard was still in development and more annoying the fd.o wiki went down and/or reorganised so it was difficult to get all the facts straight. Also because it was all new there were not many howtos etc. But with help from various people on irc I managed to write a .desktop which is basically everything you need. But to finish the whole cross-desktop-implementation qgis and it's files should also be included into the new fd.o mime-system

TS: Right so its still a work in progress?

Yes.

TS:What OS/Distribution are you running on? Did you compile yourself or download a ready made QGIS binary? Did you find the build instructions for QGIS sufficient or did you get stuck anywhere?

I'm proudly running ubuntu-hoary :) Being debian based it's a matter of apt-get install stuff. Running on packages always gives a lag, but steve kindly produces reasonable uptodate .debs for us. I'm now trying to compile qgis from tarball just for the fun of it, but obviously I haven't RTFM and it fails for me. I did it before and it worked, so I guess it's normally no problem.

TS: [forgetting all sense of journalistic integrity and non-biased reporting] Me too! Ubuntu! Ubuntu! Ubuntu! :-)

GS: we are one, we are ubuntu

We are ubuntu, we *will* assimilate you

TS: Did you say you are using QGIS for your studies? How exactly are you using it? And does it do everything you need, if not where does it fall short of the mark?

I'm doing an historical research on the spread of the appearances of churches and schools in a part of the netherlands from 1840-1920. I gather historical data from all kinds of archives and store them into a postgis database. One of the most important reasons to pick qgis was that it could work together with postgis. I use qgis to visualise the data I stored in the postgis database as maps. I thought qgis was able to directly access SQL-views, but that appeared to be not the case, but with some advice I found a way to do it without too much work. [TS: this has been addressed already in QGIS CVS] The main problem I have now is that the legend editor isn't very good (it's rubbish TBH), I need to produce many maps with similar legends and now i've to edit every legend by hand, in stead of loading a legend being able to save custom colours within a project does help a bit, but still... [TS: this is on the QGIS feature plan for an upcoming version.]

TS: Given that you are a student with endless amounts of free time on your hands [interviewer admonishes himself for mindless stereotyping], did you ever think about translating QGIS into Dutch? Do you think that would broaden the appeal of QGIS to other dutch users?

The amount of free time I have is very limited, having put myself on a deadline to finish university in april, that aside: the thought hasn't crossed my mind yet. When I finish university I probably become unemployed, so I'll have endless amounts of free time, I might look into it. But I've always used english computers and most dutch and especially those who work with GIS software are very capable to work with english software. On the other hand, having software in your own language does make some people happy. So it might appeal to some dutch, but it'll not be a decisive factor.

GS: Have you used any other GIS Software?

My university is very much windows minded nowadays, but my first encounter with GIS was through an X session to an alpha running arcview. After that it quickly changed to windows only and I've had my share of esri software.

I also did some Remote Sensing with Erdas Imagine, but nothing out of the beaten track. In my spare time (when I still had loads) I looked into grass and some very obscure RS programs I've already forgotten. I seriously researched the OSS GIS market for my current thesis and I use JUMP sometimes besides QGIS. The big disadvantage of JUMP is the lack of postgis support, but it does do shapefile editing and is quite good in the visualisation department.

TS: I recently read an article about a Dutch mayor who had all road signs and markings removed in the town center - and it brought about a radical reduction in the incidence of accidents and people were generally a lot better drivers. Do you think if we removed all text, menus, dialogs and icons from QGIS it would reduce the number of bug reports in QGIS?

I never heared that story and I think that major didn't survived very long.

But it might have worked, since every one knows the rules and they'll be more carefull when there are no obvious signs. For QGIS that analogy doesn't work, there's no such thing as a computer-driving-license (sadly) or GIS-handling-license. So without menus and buttons they'll be lost, not knowing what to do

TS: What are you three 'must visit' daily sites?

Actually I have installed liferea, a RSS feed program so the stats are skewed. I'm currently into beagle hacking, so I always visit the beaglewiki.org site furthermore I visit planet.gnome.org since the site is more fun in real life than on rss. And lastly it'll be fok.nl a dutch site which mixes real news with weird and nonsense news, it provides wonderful party-story-stuff. Back in the old days I checked slashdot, tweakers.net, fok.nl and drobe.co.uk on a (more than) daily basis, now rss takes care of that.

TS:Did you know there are a bunch of QGIS feeds available?

Nope, where?

QGIS Wiki

QGIS Community

QGIS Home

There are also the usual sourceforge ones available

GS: What are the top two or three items on your QGIS wish list?

Obviously the most important thing for me right now is a good legend editor.

I think second would be: to be able to tap into postgis more deeply. The postgis/postgresql database is very powerfull and providing a frontend to that power would openup a world of possibilities. But I can imagine that that's not the way qgis wants to go, as a standalone app. [GS: Actually we plan to add more postgres/postgis interface tools]

I'd say a more powerfull table/database editor - stuff like joining tables etc.

But this is biased on my current project, so whilst I do believe that QGIS needs better legend and table/database capabilities I'm not sure it's the most urgent. Once I'm doing different projects I'll flood the channel with new 'exciting' ideas to keep those lazy programers busy :P

TS: Well Steven its been great (and very informative) having you here on our interview series - thanks for taking the time out to talk to us!