An advantage of using map services like WMS and WMTS is that your styling has been done by someone else. But this can turn into a disadvantage as well in case the colours of your overlay are similar to the colours in your remote base layer. To show this I created an example using the [...]

De Basisregistratie Topografie (BRT/Top10NL) houdt ongeveer een kilometer na de landsgrens al op. Velen, bijvoorbeeld brandweermensen, hebben behoefte aan meer kaartbeeld over de landsgrens. Die kaartdata is er, en nog kosteloos ook. De Open Street Map (OSM) van de Europese landen is als Shapefiles te downloaden, o.a. via de Duitse GeoFabrik, http://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html. Ze wordt aangeboden in [...]

The dutch PDOK-services plugin is a simple plugin to load some national (PDOK) dataservices. One of the available services is a Web Features Service (WFS), while a very handy service, calling the WFS service to load all roads in the Netherlands shows you the following result: As you can see the blue bar are actually [...]

The building contours of BAG objects are much more precise than the standard built-up block shapes of the Top10NL topographic data set (aside from the fact that the BAG is more up-to-date than the Top10NL). The “BAG objects & addresses” data set also contains the usage function(s) of buildings. Using the BAG, it’s possible to [...]

Sorry, this entry is only available in the Dutch language

Graduated symbols are the best way to visualize absolute numbers like population size. Usually the area of the symbols is made proportional with the number to be displayed. This is especially important if the values are far apart. Methods QGIS 1.8 offers four methods to display graduated symbols. All can be found in the dialogue [...]

On Eenvoudige PDOK services plugin voor QGIS (in Dutch) Richard already described how to use the PDOK plugin to connect to webservices of the Dutch PDOK infrastructure. This infrastructure offers nationwide and publicly available WMS, WFS and some tiling services of Dutch governments. This video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjLG4KtpdYk shows how to use the plugin to create a [...]

Sorry, this entry is only available in the Dutch language

In the Netherlands, currently there is a movement to make more and more data available for the general public. This is done via different services: WMS, WMTS and WFS services via a service called PDOK (Publieke Data Op de Kaart). While creating a plugin to list and load all those layers in QGIS I had [...]

Last weekend there was a user on the QGIS users list mailinglist asking the question if QGIS had something similar like the .lyr file in the ESRI world. I knew that you could save and re-use the styling of a layer in QGIS by saving a style as a .qml style file. BUT I was [...]

If you want to influence the locations where labels, symbols or diagrams are displayed within areas, it is useful to have a separate layer with centroids. This article demonstrates how such a map layer can be created and modified in … Continue reading →

Sometimes you need to produce a series of similar thematic maps. The only difference is the field used to colour areas or show graduated symbols. Classifications or maximal symbol sizes are identical. For large numbers of maps it is quite … Continue reading →

As of July 2012, Dutch Geo-office Kadaster has published an update of the Top10NL topographic GIS data set. Areas of central-NL + Rotterdam have been updated. Some ‘holes’ in the terrain have now been corrected, and the new industrial port … Continue reading →

In response to my previous article about joining data from a csv file, I received a very good tip. From QGIS 1.8 Excel files can be opened directly in QGIS. Strange enough, nothing is mentioned about this in the ‘release … Continue reading →

Sorry, this entry is only available in the Dutch language

Sorry, this entry is only available in the Dutch language

In a previous article I have shown how data from a text file with points can be displayed as an additional layer on top of a layer consisting of areas. There was no connection between de data from both layers. … Continue reading →

GDAL and OGR (www.gdal.org) libs from Frank van Warmerdam are famous software libraries which make it possible in the Open Source world to read and write a plethora of gis file formats. The nice thing about QGIS is that it … Continue reading →