SRK Contributes to Open-Source GIS Development

SRK’s enterprise Spatial Data Portal is based on ESRI’s ArcGIS Enterprise solution with security and organization managed using Portal groups linked to Microsoft 365 Groups. SRK personnel using ESRI’s suite of desktop GIS applications benefit from the tight integration within the ESRI infrastructure and easily navigate through content organized using linked Portal Groups. At SRK, Groups are associated with physical mine sites, projects, and clients.

SRK’s enterprise spatial data strategy includes providing access to our Portal from a wide variety of software. Many tools can already access data from the GIS Portal via standard OGC formats like WMS, WFS or REST services, and QGIS has had a connector for ArcGIS REST services for a number of releases. QGIS has been limited to a REST-based service query for navigating data stored in the ArcGIS Enterprise Portal which has presented a barrier to adoption of the Portal by our QGIS user base.

To improve the QGIS user interaction with our GIS Portal, SRK contacted Nyall Dawson from North Road, who is one of the developers on the QGIS project. SRK sponsored a redevelopment of the ArcGIS REST Servers connector in QGIS to include the Portal Groups view which is included in the QGIS 3.18 Zürich release. This is a major improvement, permitting QGIS users the same degree of access to ESRI’s ArcGIS Enterprise platform as provided by ESRI’s desktop applications. 

The main benefits of this development are:

1. User ability to browse and connect to spatial data from ESRI’s Portal by Group (e.g., field site). In previous versions, the user encountered a “flat” list of all available spatial data in all Groups.
2. Administrator ability to assign user access to specific Groups based on existing company-wide security policies.

 The figure below demonstrates the change to the QGIS Browser panel:

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•  Assaf Wunsch | Consultant / Hydrogeology | SRK Consulting (U.S.), Inc. awunsch@srk.com
• Warren Medernach | Senior Consultant (Data Services)| SRK Consulting (CA) Inc. wmedernach@srk.com
• Nyall Dawson | Proprietor and Lead Developer | North Road Studios