Development of QGIS plugin for an user friendly management of climatological data in Italy

The study of potential dangerous events due to extreme meteorological conditions such as hail, wind and rainfall has been made at national scale in order to define a synthetic index representing the climatological hazard for administrative units in cartographic form.

The aims of this work is to provide the insurance companies and decision makers with user friendly Open GIS tools for analysis of meteorological parameters at a municipality scale over Italy.
qSIGAV is a plugin developed in Python that is able to change the “look and feel” of QuantumGIS environment to provide a user friendly GUI and functions to perform queries on the results of climatological study.

After plugin’s installation, qSIGAV controls several components of qGIS through its API and the QgisInterface Class in order to change menu entries, functions, graphical entities obtaining a full customized GIS system.

A DBmanager component allows the users to update, insert, delete all shape files and the associated legends of climatological themes, dataset that in qGIS are manage by SQLite3 engine.

Moreover a wizard helps the user to choose the region, domain and layer to be visualized on QGIS main view. Other tools have been developed to facilitate the insurance agents in join insurance indexes with climatological data.

All system elements as well as datasets, system database, customized functions, qGIS application have been encapsulated into a personalized setup using NSIS, an Open Source system for Windows Installer creation.

qSIGAV is a complete Open Source project that opens new perspectives for developers and GIS experts for implementing more flexible and customable GIS system applications.