6 posts tagged with "QGIS"

GIS is unusually well suited to careful AI experimentation. Geospatial work already teaches several habits that transfer directly into responsible AI: source matters, scale matters, coordinate systems matter, metadata matters, and precision does not automatically mean certainty. A map is an interpretation of evidence rather than the whenua itself, and a confident AI answer should be treated with the same discipline.

For Māori GIS, this creates a practical opportunity. AI can help people deal with very large collections of text, metadata, reports and technical material while GIS practitioners retain the familiar responsibility to check sources, preserve provenance and understand where interpretation begins.

The 2017 Indigenous Mapping Wānanga at Claudelands in Hamilton was built around modern mapping tools, practical training and a large collaborative programme. It also provided a very effective demonstration of something much less glamorous: the cloud only works if you can actually reach it. A large room full of participants and trainers opened web mapping applications, imagery and online services at roughly the same time. The venue Wi-Fi struggled, connections slowed and trainers began improvising.

It was frustrating at the time, but it remains one of the better lessons I have taken from years of GIS capability work. The problem was not simply technical. It exposed the difference between a technology being theoretically available and people having a realistic, reliable way to use it for their own kaupapa.

One of the recurring problems with conferences is that they finish just as everybody is getting useful. For two or three days there is energy, conversation, practical demonstrations and people discovering that somebody else has already solved the problem they have been wrestling with for six months. Then everyone packs up, drives or flies home and returns to their own organisation, where Monday morning has been patiently waiting.

The history of Māori GIS over the last two decades is partly a history of finding ways to keep those connections alive after the event. Conferences mattered, but so did the things that appeared between them: practitioner networks, mailing lists, workshops, outreach sessions, online groups, Indigenous Mapping Wānanga and eventually regular Ngā Poutama Matawhenua sessions. The technology changed repeatedly. The underlying need did not. People wanted to find one another, learn from one another and get practical help when the real work started.

Over time I came to understand that the important infrastructure was not really the email list, website, Facebook group or webinar platform. It was whanaungatanga: the relationships between people who kept turning up, shared what they knew, introduced others, hosted events, answered questions and made space for newer practitioners. I do not use that word to claim that I was building Māori relationships according to tikanga. I use it because the ordinary technology language of “networking” does not adequately describe what I observed. The connections were not simply contacts in a database. They carried trust, reciprocity, history and obligations to one another.

That relational quality is one of the things that made the move from conferences toward wānanga important. A conference can transfer information. A wānanga can also create space for collective learning, questioning, kōrero and knowledge moving in more than one direction. The practical Māori GIS community gradually became less about one expert presenting to an audience and more about people bringing their own kaupapa, experience and questions into the room.

For a long time I thought the obvious measure of a GIS project was the thing it produced. A map was finished, a map book was printed, a database was delivered and a set of layers worked. Outputs are comforting because they can be counted, photographed and put into reports. Māori GIS work gradually taught me to ask a much less comfortable question: what happens after the mapper leaves?

That question changed almost everything. A map can be excellent and still leave the people who need it dependent on the person who made it. A GIS can be technically sophisticated and still become useless when the one person who understands the folders moves on. A training event can be inspiring and still achieve almost nothing if the participant returns home and cannot reproduce what they saw. The real test of capability is not whether the system works while the expert is standing beside it. It is whether the work can continue afterwards, under the authority of the people who need it and in a form that can be carried forward.

Over time I came to see that this was more than a sustainability problem in the usual project-management sense. In Māori settings there was often an intergenerational dimension to the work. Whenua, place names, histories and community information were not temporary project assets. People might be using them for a Treaty claim today, environmental planning tomorrow and something quite different in ten or twenty years. The question was therefore not only whether the system survived the funding period, but whether knowledge, context and authority could survive changes in staff, software and organisations.

I am not Māori and do not claim a Māori worldview as my own. What I can describe is what working alongside Māori practitioners and communities taught me about capability. The strongest projects were not simply those that delivered technology. They were the ones that increased rangatiratanga over the work, reduced avoidable dependence and left people better able to make their own decisions about their information.

Māori GIS is not simply Western GIS blended with a layer of tikanga or Māori terminology. It begins with kaupapa, people and relationships to whenua, wai, moana and place. GIS is one tool that iwi, hapū, whānau and Māori organisations can choose and adapt for planning, kaitiakitanga, environmental mahi, historical research, Treaty work, ingoa wāhi, communication and many other purposes.

That means a useful Māori GIS resource list is not just a catalogue of software and datasets. The better question is whether the tools increase practical choice, support rangatiratanga over information and reduce unnecessary dependence on an outside specialist or platform. A free dataset is useful if people can understand it. A powerful application is useful if it serves the kaupapa. A cloud service is useful if the people responsible for the information are comfortable with where that information goes and can move it elsewhere later.

The resources below include public data and software. They are useful tools, not the source of Māori authority over the places being mapped.

Basemaps are the background layers that help you read your data in context. In Māori GIS work they often sit behind decisions about whenua, taiao, access, planning and change over time. They can also carry risk because high-detail imagery can reveal more than you intended to share.

A basemap is not simply a technical background. It quietly tells the reader what the map considers normal and important. A road map puts roads first. A cadastral background makes parcel boundaries feel fundamental. A satellite image privileges what can be seen from above. None of these is necessarily wrong, but the choice affects how the whenua is read. A kaupapa concerned with awa, maunga, historic occupation or taiao may need a very different background from a property or infrastructure map.

This post covers the main basemap options used in Aotearoa, how WMTS tiles work, how imagery is updated and how to add these basemaps into QGIS, ArcGIS Online and other tools.