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

Creating an atlas


The atlas generator is the most powerful feature of QGIS's print composer. It can create a lot of maps automatically based on a template we provide. The underlying concept is very basic--we have to provide a polygon layer with a column which has unique values. The print composer takes that layer, and creates a separate map page for every different value (therefore, feature) it can find in the provided column. Furthermore, it grants access to the current feature it uses for the given page. The real power comes from the QGIS expression builder, which enables us to set cartographic preferences automatically. With this, we can build a template for our atlas and use it to showcase each suitable area in its own map.

First of all, if we would like to create a front page with every suitable area on a single map, we have to create a feature enveloping the polygons from our suitable areas polygon layer. We can create such a polygon with QGIS geoalgorithms | Vector geometry tools ...