North Road

Who are we?

North Road offers services and training to create intelligent and beautiful maps.

We are passionate about all things geospatial, and we want to help your spatial data be used in the most effective way. Headed up by Nyall Dawson, spatial analyst and established member of the QGIS development community, North Road offers expert spatial analysis of your data, cartography, tailored enhancements and features to QGIS, training in QGIS, and assistance in transferring your business from expensive commercial GIS packages to open-source alternatives. North Road is currently owned and operated from the Sunshine Coast, Australia, however our clients are located around the world.

So why choose us?

At North Road we invest back into the open-source geospatial community. We do large amounts of volunteer fixes and feature additions across the open source geospatial stack, so by investing in us you also help support us improve the open source GIS stack.

We use the software we develop daily, so we take pride in developing stable, polished code with extensive regression testing and refined workflows. We offer long-term support for the code we create, providing proactive fixes and improvements even after a project is complete.

By choosing North Road you can take confidence in knowing that you'll receive the highest quality code for your projects.

Cartography

A drive to create beautiful, intelligent map products underlies all the work we do at North Road. We believe that maps should be both beautiful and usable, and our custom cartographic services are always undertaken with respect to this design philosophy.

Development

We specialise in custom development solutions for QGIS features, fixes and plugin script development. North Road has an established history in quality QGIS development, and our lead developer has been responsible for thousands of feature and fixes within the QGIS codebase since 2013.

Spatial Analysis

The team at North Road has extensive experience in all aspects of spatial analysis. Our services range from bulk spatial data processing, custom geocoding solutions, statistical analysis of location based data, all the way through to delivery of trustworthy, high-quality intelligence reports derived from spatial data, we have the expertise to meet your needs.

QGIS 3.28 improvements for working with ESRI formats and services

The QGIS 3.28 release is an extremely exciting release for all users who work in mixed software workplaces, or who need to work alongside users of ESRI software. In this post we’ll be giving an overview of all the new tools and features introduced in 3.28 which together result in a dramatic improvement in the workflows and capabilities in working with ESRI based formats and services. Read on for the full details…! Before we begin, we’d like to credit the following organisations for helping fund these developments in QGIS 3.28: Naturstyrelsen, Denmark Provincie Gelderland, Netherlands Uppsala Universitet, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History Gemeente Amsterdam Provincie Zuid-Holland, Netherlands FileGeodatabase (GDB) related improvements The headline item here is that QGIS 3.28 […]

SLYR Update — November 2022

Our SLYR tool is the complete solution for full compatibility between ArcMap, ArcGIS Pro and QGIS. It offers a powerful suite of conversion tools for opening ESRI projects, styles and other documents directly within QGIS, and for exporting QGIS documents for use in ESRI software. A lot has changed since our last SLYR product update post, and we’ve tons of very exciting improvements and news to share with you all! In this update we’ll explore some of the new tools we’ve added to SLYR, and discuss how these tools have drastically improved the capacity for users to migrate projects from the ESRI world to the open-source world (and vice versa). ArcGIS Pro support The headline item here is that SLYR […]

Creating circular insets and other fun QGIS layout tricks

Thanks to the recent popularity of the “30 Day Map Challenge“, the month of November has become synonymous with beautiful maps and cartography. During this November we’ll be sharing a bunch of tips and tricks which utilise some advanced QGIS functionality to help create beautiful maps. One technique which can dramatically improve the appearance of maps is to swap out rectangular inset maps for more organic shapes, such as circles or ovals. Back in 2020, we had the opportunity to add support for directly creating circular insets in QGIS Print Layouts (thanks to sponsorship from the City of Canning, Australia!). While this functionality makes it easy to create non-rectangular inset maps the steps, many QGIS users may not be aware […]

About us