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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned the basics of styling data in GeoServer. We discussed the symbolizers we can use, how XML and the XML-based SLD styling language work, and finally, how we can create styles easily with CSS. You were introduced to the syntax of the aforementioned styling languages, and now can create styles for our vector and raster maps from simple visualization purposes to more advanced cartographic use cases.

In the next chapter, we will learn about the client side. We will explain how client-side web mapping software works, and how we can utilize them to request spatial data from the server's file system or a spatial server. We will also see how we can use spatial data with JavaScript, and how we can script a web mapping software to create interactive maps with already-styled images and raw vector data.