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

Modifying the attribute table


We can not only use the attribute tables of layers, but we can also extend, decrease, or modify them. These are very useful functions for maintaining a layer. For example, as data often comes in a general format with a lot of obsolete attributes, which is practically useless for our analysis, we can get rid of it in a matter of clicks. The size of the attribute table always has an impact on performance; therefore, it is beneficial to not store superfluous data.

Removing columns

In the first example, let's delete some values from our administrative boundaries layer. If we inspect its attribute table, we can see some unnecessary columns. In my table, ID_0 and CCN_1 have constant values, which have absolutely no meaning to me. The CCA_1 and NL_NAME_1 columns are filled with null values, while VARNAME_1 is scarcely filled, therefore, I cannot use them. Let's pick every unnecessary column and remember their names. In the attribute table's toolbar, we can see some tools...