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


Congratulations! You have just created a nice map. Of course, it has some more or less obvious flaws, but I would have been very pleased if I could manage to create such a map back in my school days. Some of the flaws are more obvious, like polygons sticking out from the administrative boundary. Well of course, we can consider it artistic, but a proper map either clips its content to an irregular shape, or continues to show its thematic beyond it. We will fix that in the next chapter. Less obvious flaws are the occasional dangling lines disconnected from the visualized river and road networks, or the ill-placed labels, which would be quite hard to correct from QGIS. However, don't worry about these for now; just enjoy the feeling that you have just created a great map.

If you followed the entire chapter in one sitting, take a rest. That was a lot of knowledge compressed into a single chapter. Let it sink in. In the next chapter, we will dive into the flaws of our map, and try to correct...