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

Vector analysis


We can get a partial result by only considering our vector layers, and running some vector analysis tools on them. There are different methods for different type of analysis; however, we can group the most frequently used methods into the following four groups:

  • Overlay analysis: Analyzing features according to their spatial relationships to other features. Common use cases are spatial queries and spatial joins.
  • Proximity analysis: Analyzing the relationship of features based on some distances. The heart of this type in a traditional desktop GIS software is the buffer tool, while the rest of the work is basically overlay analysis.
  • Neighborhood analysis: Analyzing (more often, statistically) neighbouring features of some input features. When we need to find the closest features to some input features, it is called a k-NN (k nearest neighbor) query.
  • Network analysis: Analyzing a topological network, or some features on it. The most typical use case is to find the shortest path between...