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.

Our next QGIS 3D Crowdfunder with Lutra Consulting – QGIS 3D: Reality Capture, Animation & More

At North Road, we are passionate supporters of all things spatial and open source. We love it when this gives us the chance to work with new and exciting technologies, and developing 3D functionality in QGIS is just that! We are partnering again with our brilliant friends at Lutra Consulting to develop some really neat features focusing on reality capture technology, improved 3D visuals, and upgrading animation support. And there’s more! We also plan to add atmospheric scattering to create more realistic looking 3D scenes and make life easier by adding in scene presets, close various gaps in the identify tool and adding support for gamepads for easier navigation. Our financial goal to make this happen is €85 000 (about […]

Introducing the QCity Plugin

Urban Development Modelling in QGIS Introducing QCity, a new plugin that brings advanced urban development modeling directly into QGIS. Developed in collaboration with the City of Canning (Perth, Western Australia), QCity enables urban planners to model project areas using predefined frameworks, providing visual 2D/3D insights and detailed statistical reports. The plugin workflow begins in the “Project Setup” tab, where users either define a new Project Area boundary and input dwelling and parking (both car and bike) parameters, or load a previously saved site or QCity package: Next, “Development Sites” are created within each Project Area. Development Sites options include: Setting the site’s status: constructed, proposed or modelled Automatic calculation of the site’s floor space, car and bike parking (based on […]

QGIS 3D Globe – funded by a Cesium Ecosystem Grant

Open source geospatial 3D innovation has just reached another important milestone, thanks to a Cesium Ecosystem Grant for a new 3D globe view in QGIS. This is the second grant that the team of North Road and Lutra Consulting received from Cesium, and we’re proud of what we’ve delivered for our QGIS users. The new 3D globe will be available to all in QGIS v.3.44. This was an extremely interesting project to undertake, as it required a heavy research and experimentation process by our developers. There’s many potential approaches for implementing a large-scale, 3D globe, and each have their advantages and trade-offs. We were very lucky to have insight from Cesium’s Kevin Ring to advise us at the start […]

About us