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 projections


As we know, spatial data can come in different projections. However, we can work with only one projection at a time. In QGIS, we can see our project's projection on the right side of our status bar. It is denoted with EPSG:4326 for us, as this is the identifier of our projection. You might have noticed that since we added the Landsat layer, the projection changed to EPSG:4326 (OTF). This change occurred as the Landsat imagery is in another projection than our project, and QGIS automatically transformed the layer with an on-the-fly (OTF) transformation.

So, if we can transform anything to a well-recognized global projection, why should we care? We can use the Mercator projection that popular web maps (like Google Maps and OpenStreetMap) use, and overlay our data on them. Well, take a look back at the first chapter where I visualized my study area, and compare the shape of Hungary with the other images. On that map, you can see most of the countries with their real...