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

A brief overview of databases


Let's start with a very brief introduction of databases. You might have more than enough knowledge about databases; if that is the case, you can safely skip to spatial databases. First of all, what is a database? A database is a collection of structured or semi-structured data, which can be, at least, updated and queried by the Database Management System (DBMS) or the library using it. Besides its very trivial benefit of storing a lot of data in the same place, the wrapper system usually offers methods for not only retrieving but also aggregating, filtering, or joining data. Furthermore, most of the DBMS and libraries are very well-optimized for their use cases, and therefore, offer faster solutions than working with traditional files and system calls.

Relational databases

The first and oldest database types are relational databases. They hold data in a well-structured form in tables. Tables consist of rows and columns. A column represents a single attribute of...