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Software Carpentry are running a series of short blog posts where they ask their supporters what their favourite tools are. Most have been software, although a few people have gone for things like “asking for help”. QGIS probably isn’t my favourite tool, but my first few choices had already been mentioned by others…
This post originally appeared at https://software-carpentry.org/blog/2018/01/waldman-fave.html
QGIS (formerly Quantum GIS) is an open source Geographic Information System.
QGIS is capable of advanced analysis and cartography, but I don’t use it for that.
In my research in hydrodynamic modelling, I deal with a lot of spatial data – coastlines, bathymetry, and the like – and this will eventually be processed and plotted using R, MATLAB or Python.
But if I’ve received a file and simply want to take a quick look at it, or if I want to quickly compare two files that use different coordinate systems and see if things line up, most of the time I can throw the file at QGIS and it will show it to me with a few clicks. This approach lacks the reproducibility of a coded solution, but it’s an awful lot quicker for a throwaway visualisation.