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 10. A Typical GIS Problem

In the last chapter, we discussed vector analysis, and how we can perform it effectively. After explaining the basics in QGIS, we harnessed the power of PostGIS and carried out our analysis with unpaired speed. We also queried rasters, and executed a basic terrain analysis operation getting aspect values in the locations of our randomly generated houses as a result.

In this chapter, we will move on and discuss raster analysis in detail. We will learn how to use the most essential raster tools, and what kind of typical operations we can do with rasters. To spice up this chapter, first we create a scenario where we are decision makers. We search for the ideal site of our business, and we've already evaluated the criteria for the optimal site. The twist is that we are not looking for equally ideal sites, but searching for the best site for our purpose. Therefore, raw results showing possibilities are not enough in this case; we need an assessment evaluating...