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

Building your models


Congratulations on your first analysis! It was quite an adventure, right? What we've done is more than mere spatial analysis. We conceptualized a model, and made an analysis according to that. Our model stated that the vicinity of the requested amenities and features can be translated to 500 meters. Quiet places are places which are more than 200 meters away from busy roads, and more than 500 meters away from industrial places. Are these numbers exact? Of course not. They are approximations of real-world phenomena, and therefore, models.

What happens if one of the customers says that our analysis is faulty? Some of the results are too close to noisy places, others are too far from markets. We can try some other distances to make our model satisfy the customer better, although we would need to run the entire analysis every time. Luckily, in modern desktop GIS software like QGIS, there is a graphical modeler to create, save, and modify a step-by-step analysis by connecting...