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

Using GeoServer


Publishing data with QGIS Server is indeed very easy, although being a simple CGI application, it has limited capabilities. Unlike QGIS Server or UMN MapServer, GeoServer is a full-blown web application. That is, it has an internal data structure used for storing a lot of things including styles, authentication data (profiles), and references to raw spatial data. GeoServer is a Java web application, therefore, it needs a Java servlet to work (included in the default binaries). Therefore, if we start GeoServer with the technique described in Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Environment, we have to wait until the Java virtual machine starts up and the application initializes itself. Once GeoServer is running, we can access it from a browser by connecting to the 8080 port of our local server, and access the geoserver application as follows:

    http://localhost:8080/geoserver

As GeoServer uses authentication, first we have to log in with the default admin credentials. The default admin...