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

Summary


Congratulations! You just created several different web maps using different techniques. In this chapter, we learned how the client side of the web works and how we can utilize a web mapping library for our mapping needs. We can now use Leaflet to easily share our maps on the Web. We can load image layers, vector layers, style vector data, popups, and even custom projections. We also discussed some of the basic concepts of the frontend, such as the interaction of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements, or CORS.

This is the end of our journey. We learned a lot of things about GIS from the theory behind data models by creating a spatial database to publish the results on the Web. We did our best to understand how spatial data works and how it can be analyzed through various means. We got some meaningful results from our example data, which is completely open source (in most cases), just like the software we used. Take a good rest, but don't forget--this is only the beginning of a long...