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

Understanding the client side of the Web


In Chapter 11, Showcasing Your Data, we discussed how data is transferred over the Web and how servers work. In order to have a better understanding of the Web, let's discuss how web clients interpret server responses in more detail. As we already know, servers either store web content in a static format, or they generate it on the fly with CGI scripts or other web applications. We also know that these contents are usually plain text, structured text, or media files. The most common content a web client has to interpret is in structured text format, containing elements we would like to show, styles we would like to apply to our elements, and scripts we would like to run on the client side:

  • HTML: Hypertext Markup Language is the standardized form of transferring visual elements from web servers to web clients. They are XML-based documents that describe each visual element between tags. Although HTML is XML-based, a valid HTML document is not necessarily...