July '17 Meetup Minutes

Held July 18th, 2017 at the Seattle Northgate Library with eight people attending, covering the following topics:

• PSQGIS Business
• QuickMapServices
• Address Matching
• Time Manager
• Railroad Data
• Point Aggregation

PSQGIS Business

• We opened with a discussion of business. Stu Smith has decided to discontinue paying for Meetup.com and we will switch to a Google Groups group. Peter Keum and Paul McCombs were added as co-organizers on the Meetup.com account for the remaining time, as well as managers of the Google Group.

QuickMapServices

• Joel Masselink demonstrated the Quick Map Services plug-in for QGIS
  • Allows you to add web map services to qgis.
    • Google maps
    • Google satellite view
    • Open street map
    • Mapbox map services
  • We discussed what may or may not be legal to do with these map services.
    • Joel determined that commercial sources should not be used to enter data into open street map.
  • Once the plug-in is loaded go into Web Menu, select Quick Map Services go to Settings. Change to “More Services” tab and click on “Get Contribution Pack” and then click save.
  • Visibility tab in settings allows you to turn it off

Address Matching

• A discussion of address matching resources yielded two recommendations from the group:
  • Openaddress.io
  • Geocod.io

Time Manager

• Tom Macky is very interested in how to make a time series.
  • Check out the Time Manager plug-in from Anita Grazer.

Railroad Data

• Robert Catherman is looking for railroad data.
  • We discussed that Google doesn’t allow people to copy and make use of the data they publish, outside of their official services.
  • Stu suggested looking to State government web sites for rail data.
  • Joel suggested the QuickOSM plug as a quick way to access rail data from open street map.

Point Aggregation

• Stu demonstrated the aggregation of points
  • See this blog post from Anita Grazer.