Places of Interest in QGIS: HQGIS

The OSM based QuickOSM plugin offers a great way to download some data from OSM. As an alternative I am developing HQGIS which offers an easy way to get geocoded addresses, routes, isochrones and POIs for your everyday work based on the HERE API and the HERE datasets. Now the plugin offers support for the processing toolbox as well. Follow me on a short insight into POI search around desired addresses.

HQGIS: Credentials

As well as most of the online services, you need to have some credentials to use the HQGIS processing tool:

So you need to create a project (free of charge, no payment details needed), maybe using the Freemium plan. Once you’re done, save the credentials in the plugin itself:

HQGIS: Processing

Once you set up the credentials, the HQGIS plugin offers a lot of tools already in the plugin GUI. But sometimes you would like to use some tools in a processing environment. Therefore I created two different processing algorithms to offer you to geocode a layer and find additional POIs around a layer:

Due to the fine grained category definition you are able to search for different entities.

HQGIS Processing: Insight

The POI search algorithm (introduced in V0.4.3) takes a point layer as input, applies a distance measurement (like 500m on foot) and finds all the POIs in the desired categories. Unfortunately the response from the API is limited to a number of 100 places per query/return. But yet it is very convenient to use the processing tools:

The result is defined as a memory point layer in QGIS like this “map” of coffee shops in Manhattan:

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Get HQGIS

This HQGIS plugin is listed in the official plugin repo of QGIS. Alternatively you can download it from github. Enjoy!