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

Delimiting quiet houses


First of all, we should upload our random houses in our spatial database. In order to do this, let's open QGIS's database manager through Database | DB Manager | DB Manager. Connect to the PostGIS database with the role we have--write privileges--and import the houses layer with Import layer/file. Of course, we have to open our raw houses layer, as it is not opened in QGIS. The options should be the same as before, which are as follows:

  • Use the spatial schema.
  • The table name should be houses.
  • Check the Create spatial index box at least, but checking the Create single-part geometries instead of multi-part box as well will do no harm either.
  • We do not have to define SRID information, as the data is already present in our local projection.

When we are done, let's visualize the uploaded houses layer in QGIS, and remove the one saved to the disk. If everything is fine, we should keep the DB manager window open, as we will execute our SQL queries there:

Proximity analysis in...