In March, Knowledge Integration’s lead Arches developer, Samuel Scandrett, attended the first in-person Arches developer meeting at the Getty Centre in Los Angeles. The three day conference brought developers and members of the Arches community from over the world to discuss and present their work.
The agenda consisted of various presentations to highlight ongoing projects from the development community, and new core Arches features from Farallon Geographics, the primary developers of the Arches software. Not only were ideas presented, but also shared and discussed in a number of planning sessions regarding the future of the application. Sprints also took place on the final day, allowing developers to work side-by-side on new features.
Samuel presented his work on the development of an Arches QGIS plugin for resource creation and editing using the QGIS software (see Development of an Arches plugin for QGIS for more information), which was met with great interest and excitement from the community. Following the presentation, a repository was created in the official Arches GitHub organisation to house the QGIS plugin codebase. Further, the plugin will soon be added to the QGIS Experimental Plugins Repository. Now developers will be able to install the plugin on their local QGIS instance with ease and contribute to the development by developing new features or reporting bugs. These advancements were exactly what we intended when work on the plugin began; to be a collaborative and community driven project. We are incredibly pleased with how far the plugin has come, and excited for its potential now. We are also enthusiastic about working alongside Historic England to ensure the ArcGIS Pro and QGIS Plugin can follow the same roadmap of features.
We would like to once again thank Farallon for organising these meetings and the Getty for accommodating and hosting the event. It was an honour to have the opportunity to be invited, present and meet all of the developers in person. We look forward to the next one!
