Open Government Data Wien in QGIS

Vienna’s Open Government Data initiative is publishing an increasing amount of Geodata and the best thing is: They’re publishing it via open standardized services! Both WMS and WFS are available and ready to be used in QGIS.

Let’s see how we can use the data available through their WFS using the district information layer “Bezirksgrenzen” as an example. The page lists a GML and a GeoJSON version of WFS. For now, we’ll use GeoJSON.

In QGIS, the layer can be loaded using “Add vector layer” – “Protocol” and inserting the GeoJSON url there. The encoding should be changed to ISO8859-15 to account for “Umlaute”.

Now, we have geodata. Let’s add some attribute data too! Attribute data is available in CSV format. After downloading e.g. some information on the district population, check the file content and remove excessive header lines so that there is only one header line containing attribute names left. Then, you can load the CSV file into QGIS too (“Add vector layer”).

Last step: Joining geodata and attribute data! Go to the vector layer’s properties – Join tab and add the following join relation:

Now, the attribute table of the vector layer contains the additional CSV attributes – ready for further analysis. If you want to classify based on numerical CSV attributes, you’ll have to create a .csvt file first otherwise all fields are interpreted as texts.

Works great. Thumbs up for this great initiative!