Quantum GIS
Quantum GIS
Quantum GIS (QGIS) is a user friendly Open Source Geographic Information System (GIS). QGIS is licensed under the GPL.| Interview with Jens Oberender |
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Welcome to this the 9th in our QGISSER interview series. This week we travel to Nuernberg, Germany to speak to Jens Oberender. Jens is a QGIS developer and co-developer of the Lingis project. Can you start by giving us a brief introduction to yourself? Where do you live? What do you do for a living?I'm student of information technologies at the University of Applied Sciences in Nuernberg, Germany. I live in Erlangen, that's near to Nuernberg, but I am in Nuernberg for studying and working, at SUSE LINUX, a Novell Company. A workmate, Dirk Hessing (Diploma Geologist), brought me to the GIS area, but more the technical part, then the everyday usage.  How did you become aware of QGIS? While starting with GIS I searched on freshmeat.net, but at that time [QGIS development] was really quiet with no releases and commits for quite a while. Later I noticed that the project has come back to life, tried it out and liked it. What kind of work have you done on QGIS, and what motivated you to do it? As I'm familiar with the GNU auto* tools I joined the #QGIS IRC channel on freenode.net and started porting QGIS to a autotools environment. Later I helped with the integration of the plugins in the autotools environment and made several other small fixes on QGIS. What is the advantage of using auto* tools over qmake? I notice the KDE project have followed this approach too... It's easier to port it to different systems (for example MacOSX and Windows). It's more common, nearly all open source projects use it, and it's quite simple. You are one of the main people involved in Lingis. Can you tell us a little about Lingis? Lingis, is a spare time project of that SUSE workmate and me, it's a distribution of GIS software packages as extension to SUSE LINUX. It contains a lot of GIS related base libraries (which are not included in standard SUSE LINUX) for opening or handling GIS data(-formats) and some GIS programs, for example QGIS, Grass, Thuban and GMT. The 0.2 version we currently work on, also adds some packages of the GPS area, for example gpsd and GPSBabel. LinGis 0.1 was released in June 2004 and available only for SUSE LINUX 9.1 on the i386 architecture. We are planning to release version 0.2 for SUSE LINUX 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3, for both architectures i386 and x86_64. The release date can be end of April. Installation of LinGis is extremely easy, it can be done with the software installation module of Yast2, the SUSE setup tool. LinGis provides extra selections there for GIS-Servers and -Clients. Do you have any plans to develop Lingis for other distributions? No, as we both work for SUSE, only use it and the buildsystem we use is similar to the one at SUSE, it would be to much work to port it to other distributions. Are there any tools in Lingis that you would have liked to have packaged but couldnt for licensing reasons? What holes are there in the making of a free (OS) linux GIS software suite? Some GIS dataformats are only available as closed source or aren't redistributable, for example dxf, MrSid or Oracle Spatial. Therefore GDAL (the open source gis format handling library) can't be used with it's whole power. But there are still about 50 GIS open source software projects that should be added, so it's easy to come over those limitations Wow! 50 OS GIS tools that arent yet part of Lingis? How many *are* part? I mean - I never knew there was so much OS GIS stuff out there! We currently have 36 tools/libraries, but freegis.org lists 233 entries, including Windows-, Java-Software and other stuff that's not suitable for LinGis How do you publicise Lingis? Where do people go to get it? Or do you recommend that they wait until ver 2 comes out? We started the website http://www.lingis.org recently, but there isn't published a lot yet. LinGis 0.1 as available via ftp://ftp.lingis.org but only for SUSE LINUX 9.1 on i386. People with SUSE 9.2 or x86_64 have to wait for the release of 0.2. [Our] mailing list for support and feedback will be started soon, too. From your useage of the different GIS tools out there, what is QGIS still missing that other tools have already implemented? What are the main things on your wish list for QGIS? The next big step is projection, but that is planed for 0.7. Nice printing of maps is already worked on, too. Things I'd like to have in QGIS (but as I'm not a big user, are a bit childish) are a GPS-Layer that displays a moving point on the map, so you can use it for driving or on excursions, and the other is some kind of 3D visualisation of a map, one layer for the elevation and some others as texture, and the possibility to fly or walk over it. You evaluated a bunch of differnet 3D toolkits for that purpose once. What was the result of that - which toolkit did you find fastest / easiest to use / most feature rich? Demeter has already an GDAL importer and a sample programm that loads one image for elevation and one for the texture, that could be adepted and feed by a QGIS plugin, with areas and layers of a map It provides keyboard funktions for walking over the landscape and can be extended with objects (for example trees or buildings) on the surface (when it's build with openscenegraph support) What are your 3 favourite websites? Baby (your pet mouse) was featured on the QGIS 0.4 splash screen. I was interested to know how he has coped with all this attention. Has the fame gone to his head? Does he wear dark sunglasses when he goes out now so people dont recognise him? Does he insist on a new runningwheel in his cage every day now? (You can view baby at the QGIS splash screen gallery. ) He insist on some honey sweets and a waffle each day now, wants to be petted and walked on the couch more often, but he is still the old sweetie. Well I would like to thank you very much for taking the time out for the interview - and for the great contribution you have made to QGIS. We will post a notice on the QGIS Community site for you when Lingis 2 comes out so that people can be aware of its release! |
