Updated Arches Roadmap - What's new in 2020?

[Alina Myklebust]

Greetings all,

This week we published an updated Arches Roadmap on the Arches Project website.  You can find it here:  https://www.archesproject.org/roadmap/

Visit the page to find out about new key development initiatives and planned features & development work slated for 2020. 

Roadmap highlights include: 

• Arches for Science
• Arches Workflows
• Arches/esri integration 
• Important upgrades in Version 5

If you have any questions, please post them here.  Thanks!

Cheers,

Alina

Arches Project Team

[David Osborne]

Hi Alina

The developments in the roadmap look interesting, especially, for me, the science applications. However, I must admit disappointment that ArcGIS has been chosen in preference to QGIS for the GIS interface. I expect there will be several projects which were attracted to Arches due to it being free, open-source software and, like ours, have opted for QGIS for the same reason. However, my hope is that, once the team have developed the Arches plugin for Arc, it will be possible to adapt it to interface with QGIS without too much extra work.

Kind regards

David

[Alina Myklebust]

Hi David,

Thanks so much for your feedback on the roadmap.  I imagine there will be many discussions/conversations in the coming weeks/months about this new ArcGIS

integration development.   I'll ask others to chime in here too, because I'm certain there have been thoughts and considerations related to integration with QGIS too.  

Thanks again and Happy New Year!  

Very best,

Alina

[Alison Dalgity]

Greetings David. I should have replied to you (and Alina) a long time ago. My apologies.

You make an excellent point David, and I would venture to say that most of us agree with you--i.e., that our priority should be to develop integration with other open-source rather than proprietary tools. 

However, there is a clear reason why we are developing a full integration between Arches and esri–namely, the development has been financed. The effort is driven by Historic England because they use esri products widely, and they have kindly funded a significant piece of the development. (The remainder is financed by Farallon Geographics and us, the Getty Conservation Institute.)

Our sincere hope in completing this work is, exactly as you suggest, that once the development patterns are established the work to integrate Arches with QGIS will be greatly facilitated...hopefully by someone very soon!

Thanks for your candor, I really appreciate your feedback and hope that you continue to make your voice heard for the benefit of the community.

Best,

Alison

[David Osborne]

Hi Alison

Thanks for your reply and explaining the background to the Arches/Arc integration project. We will all have our own priorities so my comments were not meant to be unappreciative of the development. I applaud Historic England for helping to fund the initiative, particularly if it helps to enable integration with other software such as QGIS!

Best wishes

David

[Adam Cox]

Hi David, I have posted a question related to this in the Arches developer forum in case you are interested: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/arches-dev/VRk2ws0yMbo

Adam