Advanced Diploma of Surveying students spend much of their time improving the accuracy and precision of their skills in engineering and cadastral survey. One Unit at RMIT University's School of Vocational Engineering, Health & Sciences is called Determining Clients Spatial Requirements and is focused the surveyor working as a consultant to a land developer.
A revamp of this Unit aimed to introduce the students to using QGIS to identify the ideal land parcels for subdivision development in their individual neighbourhoods, based on land developer requirements, and publish the results to their clients via the web using QGIS Cloud.
For all students this was their first use of open source software and their first attempt at publishing on the internet.
The students accessed authoritative Victorian state government base data sets including Broad hectare Residential Land parcels, VicMap Features of Interest including schools, railway stations, hospitals etc. and VicMap property & parcel data. They identified those land parcels which met criteria suitable for subdivision based on Victorian town planning regulations, then filtered down to a Top Ten list of those parcels close to facilities and offering the best outcome for a potential developer to invest. Other criteria such as vacant land and old buildings on site were also taken into consideration.
To complete the exercise, students produced PDF reports and maps with QGIS and published their results via the web with QGIS Cloud, simulating the real life workflow of providing the land developer clients with direct access to project results.
The next step in our evolving use of QGIS is to gain experience in its terrain modelling capabilities and workflow so it can be used to support the Unit: Develop 2-D and 3-D terrain visualisations.