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 5. Exporting Your Data

In the last chapter we learned how to utilize the representation model of GIS to create spatial visualizations and digital maps. Our final map is very nice, although it has some flaws remaining. In this chapter, we will fix some of the issues (for example, dangling lines, features sticking out of the study area) and learn how to export our map to two kinds of graphics--SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and image formats (for example, PNG). Then, we will go on to learn about different spatial data exchange formats. We will discuss their main properties and limitations to be able to choose the best for our project.

In this chapter we will cover the following topics:

  • Clipping vector and raster data
  • Exporting as graphics
  • Spatial data exchange formats