Because data is outside - QField, the future of QGIS on mobile devices

hi everybody it's uh marco bernanke today i'm going to talk to you about q field the future of qgis or mobile device who am i i'm the co-founder and ceo of opengs.ch and i'm the qgis chair person also one i like to call myself the father of q field i work in switzerland i live in switzerland for the company i founded nine years ago called opengs.ch we are open source geo ninjas and we do live and love open source so all we do basically ends up in open repositories now let's move to the interesting part the most important part of today which is why cube field well because data is outside of the office when when you're doing things that are related to data you do want to be able to to do things directly where the data is and most of the time that data is not in the office you're working at so that is why uh seven years ago i decided to take qgis and put it to a mobile version touch friendly back then it was not really touch friendly it was a one-to-one port of qjs200 but nowadays it turned into something um much much better so what is it what uh what can we do we can feel what how does it look like well as i mentioned it is the mobile data collection app for qgis and it is based on some basic principle the first one is that we do want the ui to be very very very minimalistic every time we we go into adding a button or or something like that we do have big discussion if that button really does have the need to be there because when you are on the field you don't want to be fooling around with with buttons you just want to be efficient and you want to be able to to find immediately what you need to do so all we do in in queue field really always needs to go through this big discussion if buttons are allowed to come in or not that's the first very important thing of giving second very important thing which is the very core of q field itself is that we want to be allowing people to do beautiful cartography and that is well pretty easy to reach because we are using the full qgis rendering engine in the background so if you are good at designing maps they will look good on qgis and on cubism as well obviously if you are not super gifted in doing maps then they will not look better just because you are using qgis or qfid um then i said we want a very uh minimalistic ui but we do want to offer powerful tools and those tools appear only when they are needed in the background picture here you see um i'm editing a polygon and you see that the interface has grown from what we saw before there are now tools that allow me on the top left to enable topological geometry editing and then on the right we have the gps toolbox and then on the bottom right part we do have all the tools that are needed for changing node and moving to the next node and then accepting or adding nodes etc etc so it is not because we have a minimalistic uh user interface that there are uh lacking tools so the tools are there and they're gonna come whenever they're needed and that's also part of the paradigm of having only the buttons that are really needed at the moment that you need them uh the third thing that is really important to us is that we want to allow very efficient interaction with the tool so when you're out in the field and you do need to do multiple things you don't want to waste time just clicking around because the the application you're using is not helping you and that is why we we did things like here you see in the background multiple editing of attributes where you can go and select multiple multiple features and then from there on you can go click at the top right here and then you can go and edit and you will edit the the attribute that you're editing will be editable on will be edited on all the feature that you choose so for example if you go and say well all these apiaries belong to marco and now i selected this one that belongs to samantha christopher into galileo galilei i go and change the name after they will be marcus um apiary but albert einstein will still own his uh his own apiary that hasn't been selected so those kind of um kind of tools that make uh interacting with that app much easier much more efficient it's things that we try to do here and there so that you can work much much faster and more efficient on the field another thing that we did like this is for example when you're digitizing you can set a checkbox and the checkbox will remember the value that you set also in the next items that you will digitize so for example if you're digitizing apiaries that belong to marco you can say the first time you write marco and the next and then set the checkbox and from that moment on it will automatically fill marco in the field you can obviously change it but it will save you a lot of time then the next crucial point is having integration that are beneficial to your workflow so um for example camera or adding pdfs from the from the device from the gallery etc etc so very important to us that again what we put in here is uh is it it makes your life much easier when you're on the field the the next really good uh news is that well professional hardware makers are now starting delivering really cool android devices as well and we've been this is a device that we are actually currently testing and it works really well um so you have a device that is not your standard tablet it has a better reception you can use an external gnss antenna so actually the setup that you see in the picture is something that really is working and we are working together with companies like trimble and like emulate for sensors to really get the best the best fit between q field and their hardware um q field um is cloud ready or it's basically there it hasn't been published yet but you will see now and there are images on on how the qp cloud connection looks like it is a tool that allows us or will allow the users to basically seamlessly integrate your data back from the field to your to your database and your data back in the office so what do i do what do i do with q field how does my working go well first of all i prepare my project back in the office on my qgis desktop and then set up all the my login to google cloud i decide which kind of which kind of project uh which layers do i want to be managed by qfl cloud which layers do i want to be live layers which layers do i want to be ignored on the web and so on and so on so first i configure my my computer my project and this is something that usually a team leader would do if you have a group of users if you have field workers and if you have uh people that are not in the office so the person the gis expert in the office will set up and then it will send the project through keyframe cloud or through whatever mean they want to the field workers and the field workers will just deal with qfe they go and efficiently do whatever they need outside they digitize their their points their lines their polygons and so on and um very soon they'll just seamlessly synchronize the data back so then push the changes back to the to the to q3 cloud and and the data will get back to the office obviously q3 cloud is not mandatory we will see later that there are um there are workflows that work without q5 cloud they work just by synchronizing data via cable or via sync thing or dropbox or whatever you want it's just one one more tool to allow you working so what do we have in q field and here i'll just show you quickly uh a kind of a selection of things that q field can do so that you get a rough idea but it's it's i i skipped all like the basic thing that you imagine there should be there i i didn't look at them so in the gps part we do have a gps tracking so you can track wherever you're going on a field um obviously i skipped the compass we have z values you can correct for antenna height we saw before if you have an antenna that has a pool that it's a meter and 80 centimeters you can say to q field head antenna is 180 and it will automatically always remove 180 from your points that are digitizing your z values will be actually ground values ground through values and not uh and not you will not need to to change that later on editing feature editing there is obviously you can digitize points line polygons but you can do it in a topological way you can use snapping you can split polygons here in the background we see a polygon being split you can feel rings so there is very advanced feature that that are available to you in q field if you need to if you don't need to there is no no need to to go there they are not going to clutter your interface because we we stick to the to the to the [Music] to the concept of keeping the interface simple um we support the stylus here obviously you cannot see the stylus that's why i show it on a simulation on using the mouse but basically it's the same thing you can have a stylus and you can move points around or you can move the map around then we have a search it does search in the searchable layer so when you're configuring the project you configure which layers are searchable it does search in the display expression and you can click on on the button here on the right and it will zoom to the results we have a huge amount of features in the forms this slide is not really clear but it supports drag and drop from the qgis designer conditional visibility default values you can take pictures and so on we can support we do have constraints support relations so it's really all all you can imagine from qgis is is basically almost also there in in q field and it will it will just be optimized for the touch interface i already mentioned before that we do have multi edit and that's something very new which is out now in the beta release that will probably go into the production stream in a couple of weeks a week or two it's uh 1.6.1 um yeah and then another interesting feature is that you can print to pdfs so you can create layouts in the qgis project and whenever you you decide that that's it you print it and you get a pdf open up the pdf and you have the the part uh that you wear at with the well i didn't put a lot of thought in the in the uh layout itself but basically you get pdfs that are then ready to be shared to the third parties so um i've been speaking before briefly about qp cloud there are obviously workflows that uh that are not tied to google cloud so keeping cloud is one of the the possible workflow the most basic workflow is basically you are kind of the explorer you take you are the owner of your data and um you take your data just copy the whole set qjs project data over to the mobile go out and have a look around by using your data as well then what we call the loan ranger is basically this very similar thing to what the the explorer was doing but what the lone ranger does is it does digitize data on the mobile as well and in the evening or after a week or so he comes back home and synchronizes via cable the data back to the desktop and is working on his data so that's a kind of a one single person type of workflow um online live editing so in this case uh to do this scenario you need connectivity on the table not on tablet basically what happens is that the project on the desktop and on the mobile is the same and they have direct connection to our postgas database and whenever you're digitizing something on the field it gets automatically pushed to the database so you um you always have the live kind of [Music] kind of data set then offline editing you have a postgres server in qgis you with your sync you create a dump of the server or maybe a dump of a certain area and then you move that data to your mobile device you work on it from the mobile device and when you want to synchronize it back using qfilt sync again this is a complete offline editing process you can do it wherever you want you don't need any connectivity at all [Music] it's it's really very handy because you can be sure that it will it will just work anywhere it bases on geo packages so whatever you're getting back from q field is just an updated jio package and a qgis project so really really handy and then q field will synchronize back to the sorry q field sync will synchronize back your data to the database then i mentioned q field cloud which is an internal beta currently we are heavily testing it and what it does is basically something very similar to the offline editing process where instead of having qfl sync you do have qfl cloud and your data so you decide when to push data to qfilt cloud and then q3 cloud takes care of all the tablets of your team members so you can have different members in the team and it will just get back all the all the work that has been done on the field by by the workers and merge them together and then you can from the desktop get all the data back if you want or you can configure qfl cloud to directly feedback the data to your own database currently we are at version 1.6.1 it is all on qgis.org you can find all the the source code there we are very happy in for for any help um bug fix bug fixing or battery reports or yeah financial help obviously or if you need your customer application we can obviously customize q field and create a version for you so there is plenty of things that can be done there um don't don't hesitate join the f-word is it's it's all open source it's it's a great tool it works amazingly it's been used and uh downloaded by almost 200 thousand it has been downloaded almost 200 000 times so you're in good company and we're really looking forward to to getting [Music] help from you a bit in in bug fixing or tell us what the amazing things we are doing with it tell us how what you like what you don't like give us feedback we we leave for that and we really like hearing back from you and from what you're doing if you have any questions um please uh go ahead through court which i think will give them to me and if not you can go to qfield.org and get more information about q field the the mobile app and if not to qfilt.cloud and you can get more information about what uh what is going to come on kfit.cloud in general to follow us on twitter we have ad open gsth or at qfing core and at keefer cloud so um yeah thanks a lot for um for listening hope you got a i got an idea of what you can do with q field and let's see if there are any questions thanks marco that was great nice to have an update um one question it was asked a few times was what are the plans for making this available on apple devices through the apple store okay um we have already started building it for apple as well um there the apple store is kind of a bit of a thing we don't know yet uh exactly licensing wise but we have started building the ios version of it so distribution will will be eventually probably still this year there will be an ios version how it is distributed is still a bit unclear but probably it's probably this year still and can you um explain that the timing for when q field cloud will be available and and what the accounts how the how the accounts will work with that yeah so the timing what we're looking at is to do a couple more months of like the whole august and september of beta testing internally and with selected people that clients that we do know that have been giving us a lot of feedback in the past about key field um so kind of like a privileged uh they've been helping us a lot with feedbacks and with bug reports and with with ideas so we are going to work with them first but uh in the let's say q4 q4 probably uh there should be q field cloud around and how the the how the accounts are going to work is basically you're going to have a private like personal accounts and team accounts so um if you do have a team with multiple people you you'll build a team and you can add the personal accounts to it okay kind of imagine kind of github if you know the model of github it's it's gitlab it's gonna be very much like hitler yeah great um and we have someone who's asking if you can explain a little bit more the offline editing workflow and and how that might work [Music] so basically the offline workflow is when you say when you're for sure not having you're sure that you're not going to have connectivity um you do have your postgas database or some kind of data somewhere it can be geopackages can be shapes whatever and on qgis you install the q field sync plugin and when you you do that you can say create an offline project you click on it and you decide okay this layer i want this layer i want that layer i do not care about on the mobile that one i do not care about and qflc will give you um a reconfigured qgis project with the according geopackage so everything will be put in a geo package the kind of the dump of the database you can select what area you want or the whole database it will get into your geopackage and then you take your your jib package and the qgis project and you move them to the device on the device you work work work the the geopackage is a smart or q field is smart and will store in the geo package as well what has been done on the field and when you move it back with q field sync you feel sync will read what has happened on the field and it will play back those things into your database into your original data source okay great hope it is clear yeah yeah that's fantastic um that that's the time we have so i sort of really thank you for giving us that update on q field and q field cloud really appreciate it and uh we'll look forward to following online cool thank you very much thanks for inviting and have a great continuation

Channel: QGIS North America

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Id: 91v1p5AEJTQ

Length: 24min 35sec (1475 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020