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 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 […]

QGIS 3D Tiles – thanks to Cesium Ecosystem Grant!

We’ve recently had the opportunity to implement a very exciting feature in QGIS 3.34 — the ability to load and view 3D content in the “Cesium 3D Tiles” format! This was a joint project with our (very talented!) partners at Lutra Consulting, and was made possible thanks to a generous ecosystem grant from the Cesium project. Before we dive into all the details, let’s take a quick guided tour showcasing how Cesium 3D Tiles work inside QGIS: What are 3D tiles? Cesium 3D Tiles are an OGC standard data format where the content from a 3D scene is split up into multiple individual tiles. You can think of them a little like a 3D version of the vector tile format […]

FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2023 Auckland round up

Recently, we had the pleasure of helping organise the FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2023 conference in Auckland. It was a fantastic week and felt like a worthy return to pre-covid events full of great presentations, catching up with old friends, making new ones, and of course – delicious food! The venue, Auckland University of Technology, put on a really professional event with catering, venue spaces and their Audio Visual operations. Auckland gave us great weather, and great venues to enjoy each others company in. We were blown away with the variety of presentations and the talent our Oceania region holds. We got to meet some of our clients in person including Koordinates, A.B. Heritage and Soar, which we loved, plus we […]

About us