Introduction

QGIS (http://www.qgis.org/) is an Open Source Geographic Information System licensed under the GNU General Public License. The project was born in May 2002 and was then established as a project on SourceForge. QGIS is now an official project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo: http://www.osgeo.org).

QGIS allows users to view, manage, edit and analyze spatial information, in addition to composing and exporting maps. Among GIS software, QGIS is simple to use and intuitive. When it was created, QGIS only offered the main functionalities, but it benefits from a very active community and is evolving rapidly. Today, it has become an essential GIS software, among the most powerful and complete.

QGIS has the advantage of running under different systems: Linux, Unix, Mac OSX, Windows and Android. It supports many vector, raster and database formats and functionalities. It has an ever-increasing list of features through a powerful plugins system. QGIS integrates with other open-source GIS packages, including PostGIS, GRASS, MapServer, GeoNode.

QGIS is maintained by volunteer developers who release updated versions every four months and many plugins. Older versions are still available for download. An LTR (Long Term Release) version is released approximately every 2 years.