New Virtual Raster Data Provider for Raster Calculator in QGIS

QGIS and Tasks
QGIS is a powerful Free and Open Source GIS software, you can work with everything that has some spatial characteristics. The aim of this project is to add some tool to the existing raster calculator to facilitate some workflows.

Project proposal
The proposal for GSoC 2021 that I submitted can be found here.

Abstract
QGIS already has an integrated raster calculator, where user can enter an expression that will apply raster algebra functions to one or more input rasters and produce a new raster file. This project aim is to develop a new virtual raster data provider that can help to use the raster calculator without creating a lot of files on a disk. It will be possible to perform the computation on the fly when map gets rendered. It will be therefore possible for the users to see the results of raster algebra expression that has been typed without the creation of derived raster files. For example, it should be possible to compute the NDVI index on-the-fly.

Link to Github repository: Repository

17th May - 7th June
Community bonding period: 17th May - 30th May 1st June - 7th June
 * 1) Taks:
 * Set up of the development environment for QGIS (build the code from source, fork the official Repository, set Qt creator environment as it's described in the documentation for the developers );
 * Start to dive into the code base by studying the existing QgsRasterDataProvider;
 * Introduce myself over the channel and shared my proposal on the mailing list for suggestions and feedbacks;
 * Get in contact with mentors, try to code something and look for some small bugfix I can work on;
 * Create a wiki page for the project and my User page;
 * Join Slack channel created by mentors;
 * Sumbit a PR for simple bugfix to the official repository;
 * Update of the proposal and share the updates with the community;
 * Study the codebase, start to study and implement some simple unit test;

Student's Biography
I am Francesco Bursi and I’m currently enrolled at Advanced Master on "GIScience and Unmanned System for the integrated management of the territory and the natural resources - with majors" with specialization in GISCIENCE and GEOINFORMATICS (Level 8 EQF) at the University of Padua, in Italy. I took my master’s degree in civil engineering attending the Polytechnic of Turin in 2017. I'm passionate about informatics and GIS, and I really love OS environment. Some more information about me can be found on Linkedln and on Github

Mentors
Martin Dobias

Peter Petrik