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

Writing SLD styles


GeoServer's renderer uses, and is basically built around, the SLD (Styled Layer Descriptor) specification. SLD is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) extension specified by OGC. It allows rich representation of the underlying spatial data regardless of their type. As SLD is XML based, it is a structured text using tags, attributes, and values. In order to understand SLD better, let's go through the description of the style we opened before.

Note

The original SLD specification is very universal and extensive, therefore it is complex. Moreover, GeoServer has a great implementation capable of harnessing most of its features. Therefore, in order to keep the learning curve calm, we will only use a small subset of SLD. We have to make two assumptions in order to do this--we only use catalog styles (that is, static styles managed from GeoServer), and every vector layer contains only one type of geometry.

The first line in grey describes that the content as a valid XML document of...