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


In this chapter, we learned about the most popular spatial data exchange formats for both vector and raster data. We learned not only their specialities but also how QGIS can create them. We also know now how to export our digital maps both as a regular image and in SVG for post-processing. Finally, we learned how to shrink our data or enhance our map by reducing the layers to only cover the relevant parts.

In the next chapter, we will look into the definition and types of databases and how spatial databases compare to them. We will discuss the possibilities of building our spatial data structure and build our very own database with PostGIS and QGIS. Additionally, we will see how QGIS communicates with PostGIS and how we can build basic PostGIS queries.