Floss in Cadastre and Land Registration

Where QGIS is being used

In contrast to the interactive maps served by UMN MapServer, the desktop GIS 

has to offer a flexible view of the several geospatial data of Solothurn. QGIS Desk-

top GIS is in use by more than 50 users for their daily work, although they are no 

GIS experts. Their main work is to visualize and / or capture geospatial data with an 

 intuitive user interface.

One of the most important Desktop GIS issues is the question: “How do I get 

the information from the PostGIS geodata repository?“. Since our end users are 

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Figure 4.9: “SO!GIS Layer“ plugin developed at the Canton of Solothurn.

Figure 4.10: “SO!GIS Suche“ plugin developed at the Canton of Solothurn.

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not familiar with data models and underlying structures of our spatial database, it 

was not option to just offer them a raw connection to the PostGIS DB. It became 

 necessary to establish a metadata database that stores the descriptions of all data, 

called “SO!DATA“.

SO!DATA contains a human readable inventory of the data models and the 

non-GIS-expert users are able to use this database to discover the information 

they need.

To remove the need for end users to interact directly with PostGIS connections 

and table selection dialogs, a plugin has been developed in python. The plugin is 

called “SO!GIS Layer“ (see Figure 4.9). The plugin connects to the SO!GIS PostGIS 

repository, retrieves the information of all published geospatial data layers from 

SO!DATA and offers the user a GUI to find the data layers they need. With this 

 infrastructure in place, the users are satisfied – they can individually prepare for 

geoprocessing, editing and map composing.

Another required QGIS plugin that has been created, is called “SO!GIS Suche“. 

This plugin provides the possibility to search for locations such as townships, 

 addresses or cadastral parcels (see Figure 4.10). As a result, the user is able to 

 navigate easily to an area of interest.

There are many other plugins under development. These will support data ma-

nipulation, analysis or mapping for different projects. Our in-development plugins 

cover topics such as nature reserves, soil conservation, cadastral data verification, 

crisis management, abandoned sites and similar issues.