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

Styling our data


Let's start with a gentle introduction to the representation model in GIS. For these examples, we will need our modified administrative boundaries layer, our GeoNames layer, our river network, and one of our elevation maps.

Note

From now on, you can use the extract of your GeoNames layer, if your original one is too large.

Not only do the data models of rasters and vectors differ, but also their representation models. As rendering in every decent GIS software is hardware-accelerated, raster data are converted to textures, while vector data are tessellated in the rendering pipeline. Hence, raster values have to be mapped to 8-bit or 24-bit textures (images), while the capabilities of vector visualization depend on the implementation. The minimum capabilities are drawing icons as textures, regular shapes, connected lines, and polygons with user-defined fill and stroke colors.

Styling raster data

First, let's see our elevation model, opened in the second chapter. As we discussed...