About me and the GIS for Geotechnical Practitioners Course
Welcome to my first ever blog.
The main point of this post is to raise awareness of a course I have developed aimed at geotechnical practitioners operating in Australia and New Zealand and to introduce myself. I have run these in conjunction with the Australian Geomechanics Society and New Zealand Geotechnical Society.
The course encourages geotechnical engineers and engineering geologists to develop their skills in the use of GIS as a regular tool in their work. I have used the popular QGIS programme to do this and developed a series of exercises using real geotechnical data to illustrate a variety of GIS tasks.
If you are at all interested in participating in a course please drop me a line and detail any special requests. Some of my previous students actually had a reasonable amount of prior GIS experience but were motivated to attend to improve their skills or as a way of migrating to QGIS from other GIS software. I am continually adapting the course based on feedback received. With so many free resources available on the internet to get people started, it makes sense for absolute beginners to watch a couple of YouTube videos and do some reading beforehand. This means that I can concentrate on the more specific geotechnical tasks a practitioner would tend to do, certainly at the desktop investigation stage. This will include compiling a variety of data and developing a geological/geotechnical model with cross-sections.
About myself and GIS: My name is Colin Mazengarb and my career has been spent working in government geological surveys in three countries mainly as a regional geologist and engineering geologist.
I have been an ArcGIS user for more than two decades but more recently started using learning QGIS as a vehicle for the geotechnical courses. However, the more I have become familiar with QGIS, the more I have used it in my day to day work and is now my preferred GIS tool of choice. I should say that ArcGIS is an amazing piece of software engineering that has underpinned so much of the GIS ecosystem internationally for so many years. However, in working with the geotechnical community, many companies both large and small cannot afford to have everyone working in the Arc environment but the larger companies will continue to have specialists using proprietary GIS and CAD software none-the-less.
The open-source phenomenon is highly disruptive and the downside to all of this is that business models have to change to survive. There are many software companies that have closed their doors and good people became casualties. Amongst the open-source community, some applications have "died" but had amazing tools that have not been replicated. For instance, ILWIS had a stereo-photo capability allowing one to do geological/geomorphological air photo interpretation (API) in a GIS environment. There are winners and losers both in proprietary and open-source software and QGIS has risen to be the dominant open-source GIS solution. While some software has died, other open-source variants, such as SAGA and GRASS continue to have a life by making their algorithms accessible to QGIS. Thus QGIS becomes an alternative front end for these programs and the developers of the algorithms can continue to develop their science knowing it is being exposed to a massive community.
QGIS is also being seen as a front end to a number of proprietary applications, with the RiverFlow-2D hydrodynamic modeling software being an example that I know of and use. Traditionally flood modelling software lived in a parallel universe to GIS and conversion from one to the other was not straight forward or efficient. The makers of RiverFlow-2D among others have made the integration of GIS data and flood modelling so much more seamless than ever.
One of the feel-good aspects of working with open-source software is that it encourages a collaborative ethic amongst a community of believers. The growing availability of QGIS plugins is providing an amazing capability for this particular GIS environment. Even in the geological/geotechnical sphere, there are several tools that are incredibly useful and relevant such as the Geoscience plugin that rival or exceed the capability of proprietary software.
Sorry about the sermon. My following blogs will focus on tips and tricks for geoscience applications in QGIS that I have found particularly useful.
Regards
Colin
(colinintas@gmail.com)
The main point of this post is to raise awareness of a course I have developed aimed at geotechnical practitioners operating in Australia and New Zealand and to introduce myself. I have run these in conjunction with the Australian Geomechanics Society and New Zealand Geotechnical Society.
If you are at all interested in participating in a course please drop me a line and detail any special requests. Some of my previous students actually had a reasonable amount of prior GIS experience but were motivated to attend to improve their skills or as a way of migrating to QGIS from other GIS software. I am continually adapting the course based on feedback received. With so many free resources available on the internet to get people started, it makes sense for absolute beginners to watch a couple of YouTube videos and do some reading beforehand. This means that I can concentrate on the more specific geotechnical tasks a practitioner would tend to do, certainly at the desktop investigation stage. This will include compiling a variety of data and developing a geological/geotechnical model with cross-sections.
About myself and GIS: My name is Colin Mazengarb and my career has been spent working in government geological surveys in three countries mainly as a regional geologist and engineering geologist.
I have been an ArcGIS user for more than two decades but more recently started using learning QGIS as a vehicle for the geotechnical courses. However, the more I have become familiar with QGIS, the more I have used it in my day to day work and is now my preferred GIS tool of choice. I should say that ArcGIS is an amazing piece of software engineering that has underpinned so much of the GIS ecosystem internationally for so many years. However, in working with the geotechnical community, many companies both large and small cannot afford to have everyone working in the Arc environment but the larger companies will continue to have specialists using proprietary GIS and CAD software none-the-less.
The open-source phenomenon is highly disruptive and the downside to all of this is that business models have to change to survive. There are many software companies that have closed their doors and good people became casualties. Amongst the open-source community, some applications have "died" but had amazing tools that have not been replicated. For instance, ILWIS had a stereo-photo capability allowing one to do geological/geomorphological air photo interpretation (API) in a GIS environment. There are winners and losers both in proprietary and open-source software and QGIS has risen to be the dominant open-source GIS solution. While some software has died, other open-source variants, such as SAGA and GRASS continue to have a life by making their algorithms accessible to QGIS. Thus QGIS becomes an alternative front end for these programs and the developers of the algorithms can continue to develop their science knowing it is being exposed to a massive community.
QGIS is also being seen as a front end to a number of proprietary applications, with the RiverFlow-2D hydrodynamic modeling software being an example that I know of and use. Traditionally flood modelling software lived in a parallel universe to GIS and conversion from one to the other was not straight forward or efficient. The makers of RiverFlow-2D among others have made the integration of GIS data and flood modelling so much more seamless than ever.
One of the feel-good aspects of working with open-source software is that it encourages a collaborative ethic amongst a community of believers. The growing availability of QGIS plugins is providing an amazing capability for this particular GIS environment. Even in the geological/geotechnical sphere, there are several tools that are incredibly useful and relevant such as the Geoscience plugin that rival or exceed the capability of proprietary software.
Sorry about the sermon. My following blogs will focus on tips and tricks for geoscience applications in QGIS that I have found particularly useful.
Regards
Colin
(colinintas@gmail.com)
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