Book Image

Practical GIS

Book Image

Practical GIS

Overview of this book

The most commonly used GIS tools automate tasks that were historically done manually—compiling new maps by overlaying one on top of the other or physically cutting maps into pieces representing specific study areas, changing their projection, and getting meaningful results from the various layers by applying mathematical functions and operations. This book is an easy-to-follow guide to use the most matured open source GIS tools for these tasks. We’ll start by setting up the environment for the tools we use in the book. Then you will learn how to work with QGIS in order to generate useful spatial data. You will get to know the basics of queries, data management, and geoprocessing. After that, you will start to practice your knowledge on real-world examples. We will solve various types of geospatial analyses with various methods. We will start with basic GIS problems by imitating the work of an enthusiastic real estate agent, and continue with more advanced, but typical tasks by solving a decision problem. Finally, you will find out how to publish your data (and results) on the web. We will publish our data with QGIS Server and GeoServer, and create a basic web map with the API of the lightweight Leaflet web mapping library.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
14
Appendix

Chapter 1. Setting Up Your Environment

The development of open source GIS technologies has reached a state where they can seamlessly replace proprietary software in the recent years. They are convenient, capable tools for analyzing geospatial data. They offer solutions from basic analysis to more advanced, even scientific, workflows. Moreover, there are tons of open geographical data out there, and some of them can even be used for commercial purposes. In this chapter, we will acquaint ourselves with the open source software used in this book, install and configure them with an emphasis on typical pitfalls, and learn about some of the most popular sources of open data out there.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Installing the required software
  • Configuring the software
  • Free geographical data sources
  • Software and data licenses