Linear Referencing in QGIS?

Question

I work for a survey company doing gas lines GIS. We use QGIS.

We create hand drawn sketches of pipelines containing all sorts of information including: materials used, skew numbers of equipment installed, exact location from a datum ( 0 point), etc. what we would like to do is use QGIS to replace the hand drawn portion of the job. Basically, create, in the GIS program, the drawing, have symbology present each pipe/material location and be able to select that location and have a dialog box populate with the location attributes: skew numbers, material used in that exact local.

Are there any plugins for this?

Answer 1

You can use the LRS plugin, which enables linear referencing support for QGIS. You can read the documentation here. As you can find there, the plugin supports several linear referencing methods:

• Route calibration: Helps you to set measures along routes and interpolate between missing values. It is the initial step for performing other operations on routes.

• Locate: For you to get coordinates on the line for a given measure, e.g., you want to locate the Km6+350 on the route.

  

• Create events: Allows you to load tables with information of features along the route.

  • Point events: You could load a non-geometry table (e.g., a dbf table) with rows representing points on the route with given chainage (measure), id, type, and the like.
  • Linear events: You could load a non-geometry table (e.g., a dbf table) with rows representing segments along the route (think about pipelines with different diameters) with given start measure, end measure, id, type, and the like.

  

• Calculate measures: Useful if you have coordinates of points lying on the route (or if you just draw a point on the route) and want to get the chainage of such point. Look for instance How to find Chainage of points using QGIS

  

I think this plugin is certainly appropriate to use cases such as yours.