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I am looking for an open source GIS and now asking myself if it is possible to integrate a route planner into QGIS.

The route planner should be able to calculate the distance from one position in the map in all directions (e.g. 30 minutes driving time) and mark it as a catchment area. It would also be helpful to export the data of the marked area to excel (e.g. name of the administrative districts and also demographic date).

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Which problems should this route planner be able to solve? There already is a routing plugin for QGIS. – underdark♦ May 11 '12 at 10:22
Thanks for asking back. The route planner should be able to calculate the distance from one position in the map in all direktions (e.g. 30 minutes driving time) and mark it as a catchment area. It would also be helpfull to export the data of the marked area to excel (e.g. name of the administrative districts and also demographic date). Do you know if it is possible. – user7567 May 16 '12 at 14:23
Which data do you want to use for routing? – johanvdw May 16 '12 at 14:55

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It is certainly possible to do routing and catchment zone analysis in QGIS if you combine it with PostGIS's pgRouting. The learning curve will be rather steep if you are not used to any of these tools.

I have a couple of posts on the topic from installing pgRouting to calculating catchment zones: http://underdark.wordpress.com/tag/pgrouting/

Of course it is possible to intersect the catchment zones with any second dataset (like administrative districts). That should be the easiest part :)

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Thanks for helping. Your descriptions from the link you sent sound rather complicated to me. But that's probably cause I am definitely not used to any of these tools. :) Is it obligatory to know how to use program languages in order to put it into praxis? – user7684 May 22 '12 at 9:03
@Spatz: It shouldn't be necessary to program but you'll certainly need to get comfortable with SQL. – underdark♦ May 22 '12 at 14:21
Once could argue that SQL itself is a domain-specific programming language :) – blah238 Jun 22 '12 at 2:04

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