Documentation for GIS users

[huard]

Document how can QGIS and ArcGIS users access PAVICS services.

[huard]

With a focus on climatedata.ca portal data.

[Zeitsperre]

I'll need to speak with @tlogan2000 on this one. There still doesn't seem to be a viable option for integrated WPS in QGIS. Not sure what the landscape is like for ArcGIS at the moment.

This could be a good instance to try out ArcPy and PyQGIS with jupyter, but this will require some new notebooks and dependencies. I'll have time next week to look at this.

[huard]

To be discussed with Travis, but I think the goal here is to document what is possible to do with common tools (ArcGIS, QGIS) and little to no programming. I suspect we can at least access and visualize the data from the climatedata.ca portal.

Identifying the obstacles to running WPS processes from these clients would also be useful. Can we open tickets upstream to have this functionality at some point in the future? Do we need to create plugins to do that ? What's the roadmap to be able to run processes from a GIS client ?

[Zeitsperre]

Good questions. I know for a fact that there is demand for these services. The previous major release of QGIS had a plugin that provided some WPS integration that could be run visually without using a terminal/script. The more recent version releases have much better native integration of other OGC web services (WMS, WFS, and WCS, I believe).

I haven't looked in a while but there might be a fork of the original WPS plugin that people are working on. Worst case scenario; we can at least leverage the other services into a guided workflow documentation.

[tlogan2000]

I'm an ArcGIS guy so can chime in on some stuff here:

Are we interested in calling WPS and/or simply accessing data via OPENDAP, WCS, WMS? or both?

Accessing calculated indexes datasets (climatedata.ca or PortraitsClim) would be doable I think. I had managed to do it via Opendap in ArcGIS pro...

Calling wps might be trickier as far as I know there is no official WPS client for ArcGIS ... just some third party stuff which I have never managed to get to work.
It would probably be possible to build a custom arctoolbox in python that would call birdhouse processes but would require a bit of work https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/10.3/analyze/creating-tools/a-quick-tour-of-python-toolboxes.htm

Note- Normally you would build a custom toolbox to simply ease calling local python processes from arcpy for non python pros but nothing stops us from building around other libraries. Users would have to be comfortable cloning the default arcgis conda env (default is read-only to avoid messing everything up I assume) then installing birdy and other dependencies in the clone etc etc

[huard]

I suggest we document what's doable now out of the box (tutorials / how-to), and map what would be possible with the estimated effort and submit this for CCDP3 (two-pager).

[Zeitsperre]

Leaving this here for later. This could be an interesting thing to look into supporting if we want to try PyQGIS-based approaches in the mid/long term: PyQGIS-WPS.

[Zeitsperre]

I've been trying to get PyQGIS to work with system-installed Python but have run into problems with compatible plugins (like Jupyter/Ipython console) for bleeding edge Python3.8 (not good for rolling-release distributions). There is however a conda-forge-based QGIS (https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/qgis). This could be a way of specifying the version of Python that a tutorial would support. Will continue with this today and tomorrow.