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:
Credentials in the Freemium plan
Credentials in the Freemium plan
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:
Credentials in the HQGIS plugin
Credentials in the HQGIS plugin

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:
QGIS processing using HQGIS algorithms
QGIS processing using HQGIS algorithms
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:
Select different categories for your POIs
Select different categories for your POIs
The result is defined as a memory point layer in QGIS like this “map” of coffee shops in Manhattan:
coffee shops in Manhattan found by HQGIS
coffee shops in Manhattan found by HQGIS
.

Get HQGIS

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